My 8 year old son and I have just finished watching the excellent third series of Dr Who. For me takes me back to my childhood growing up in the 1970s and 1980s watching Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker battle the Daleks, Cyberman and Autons.

And I have a confession to make to readers of this blog, when I was 8 I wanted to build my own Tardis so that i could travel from where I lived to anywhere in a matter of seconds. As I've got older I've come to realise that building a Tardis might take a while, particularly when the local supermarket has sold out its last lot of sticky back plastic and diswashers mean we dont go through washing up bottles as frequently as when i was young.

I digress, and i suspect you are wondering what has the Tardis got to do with rail travel.

Well occasionally I do believe that people are in possession of a Tardis, capable of taking them to wherever they want to go at unimaginable speed, when people tell me why they dont catch the train because its too slow. This is backed up when they proudly boast of how if they jumped in their car they can get from the likes of Milford Haven, Fishguard or Haverfordwest to Cardiff in around an hour and get 70 miles to the gallon for good measure. How can the train look to compete with such speed, I ask myself.

Well I've thought "why dont I tell people what the train service does achieve in terms of journey times, fairly regularly (keeping to them 9 times out of 10 according to current figures.) and let them decide." So that's why I do.

Haverfordwest to Carmarthen in under 40 minutes.
Milford Haven to London in under 5 hours.
Narberth to Llanell in under an hour.

All slower than the Tardis perhaps, but the car - you tell me?