Oh, there are people working at Transport for Wales in the railway head office in Cardiff! Gosh, they even know we exist in mid Wales. Wow! Wonders never cease!

And, what’s even more surprising to the people of this region, it appears that the head honchos at TfW seem to have listened to our bitching and moaning that they were totally screwing things up when it came to their new timetable plans.

Cast your mind back to April, when the Welsh Government-owned rail operator detailed changes that would have seen cuts on the Cambrian Coast line between Machynlleth and Pwllheli. They also said they planned to further delay to a long-promised hourly service between Aberystwyth and Shrewsbury. Mind you, on that particular promise, we’ve only been waiting a decade or so.

But, hey ho, Tfw now says it plans to run one train an hour to Aberystwyth only in the summer months between March and September. But true to the rail operator’s poor form, we’re all out of luck over the winter.

And as to keep us all here living in hope that one day, just one day, soon, maybe, they might provide us with decent service, the rail bosses have deemed us worthy of getting one more train at 4.30pm from Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth all year round. Weeeeee!

The TfW statement statement says this extra train “is because of a known capacity issue on 17:30 train from Shrewsbury to Machynlleth.” Even then, it comes with a caveat: “TfW aim to introduce this extra train in May 2025 but is subject to agreement with other operators and Network Rail. The wider one train per hour will come in from March 2026.”

For the record, TfW, you made the promise of hourly trains 14 years ago.

So what’s taking you so long?

Over those 14 years, services and new trains have come to the north Wales line, the Borders, Cardiff and Swansea. And here, in mid Wales? Empty promises, full trains, old rolling stock -- and the perennial hope that things might somehow improve.