GREAT Western Railway issues more than 100 apologies to customers every day about problems with its services.

According to the website sorryfortheinconvenience.co.uk, which adds up the amount of times ‘sorry’ is said on a company’s social media, GWR has issued more than 30,000 since the start of the year – an average of around 110 per day.

But the company has said that as a percentage of its customers, the number of complaints is low.

James Davis, media relations manager at GWR, told the Adver: “We have around 105 million passenger journeys every year, so the number of people we say sorry to is actually very minimal.

“The majority of our customers are very happy with our service.

“If you divide the number of apologies by the number of passenger journeys that we take, you will get a figure which is significantly less than one per cent.”

“We have somewhere in the region of 700,000 followers on Twitter and a similar number on our Facebook pages.

“It’s very much a direct method of being able to contact us as a company.”

Joanna Linzinger, who manages the GWR social media team and Twitter and Facebook accounts, said: “When you type, it’s difficult to make it sound like you’re not being patronizing or sarcastic, so we have to try really hard to make our sorries sound like they’re coming from a warm person rather than a keyboard.”

New York Times reporter David Segal visited the social media team at GWR as a focus for a dispatch to what he labelled ‘The Age of Sorry’ for the long delays affecting train companies across the UK.

As well as inside-view of the team, who undergo extensive training to respond to complaints empathetically 24 hours a day, it paints the picture of train use in Britain as a ‘shambles’ creating an ‘endless cascade’ of apologies.

“Apart from Northern Rail, GWR is one of the sorriest train lines of them all,” it added.

There have been over 425,000 apologies by UK bus and train companies so far this year.

GWR is second amongst train companies for the total number of apologies, coming in just behind Northern Rail which says sorry 120 times a day on average.