HAVE you ever found it necessary to travel from Blackburn to Preston on a cold and very windy morning?

The experience is not very pleasant, especially if you are disabled.

Disablement does not necessarily mean you have to be wheelchair bound, but can be heart or other non-obvious symptoms.

On May 19 my wife and I, on a visit to family in Surrey, decided to travel by rail, as we often do, but this time starting at Blackburn and not Preston as we usually do.

We found the lift to our platform was non-existent, only to platforms one and two, not four, resulting in us facing a substantial incline until we reached the said platform number four.

By this time, and together with the cold conditions, my wife arrived in a state of breathlessness that would have meant we could not have caught our connection had it come in then, but fortunately it was a further 10 minutes before it arrived.

The shelter was primitive, to say the least, and was obviously just meeting basic requirements.

As a former railway worker in Blackburn and a keen railway traveller, I was disgusted at the deterioration in the standards now prevalent in my home-town railway station.

Whoever designed and accepted such, obviously do not travel from this station and I can assure you it is sad to say that in future it will be from a decent station and not something that resembles a village branch line.

MR D SMITH, Priors Close, Blackburn.