SWINDON passengers have to put up with about two cancelled trains a day, new figures have revealed.

Last year a total of 643 trains were axed by First Great Western, which runs services to London and South Wales through Swindon, because of staff shortages, breakdowns and track failures. This is an average of 1.8 trains a day.

But the figures show the company's ageing trains FGW trains are on average 25 years old are still performing much better than rival operators.

Central Trains were forced to cancel 45 services a day in 2005 while Northern Trains cancelled 35 a day.

The figures, revealed in parliament, show a total of 295 FGW services were cancelled because of technical faults with the train, while 33 were due to the lack of a driver or train manager.

Network Rail, which owns the track and signals, was blamed for 197 cancellations.

First Great Western Link, which runs services in the Thames Valley, had a worse performance averaging seven cancelled services a day.

The overall figures revealed a train is cancelled every five minutes on Britain's railways. The 104,342 axed services were the equivalent of scrapping the entire national timetable for more than five days.

The cancellations were attacked by Tory transport spokesman Chris Grayling.

He said: "Rail passengers live with the frustration of cancelled trains day after day. Now we can see just how often these occur."

FGW spokesman Adrian Ruck said: "Normally when a train is cancelled it is for circumstances beyond our control, such as engineering work.

"For the last year our reliability figures have been 99.1 per cent, so the vast majority of trains do run. We're always trying to improve the figures, but we are very pleased with these. They are a pat on the back for FGW."