Phil Bickley, from Hungerford in Berkshire, runs a clothes shop in Portobello Road, west London, and usually catches the 8.46am First Great Western train from Hungerford to Paddington.

He pays £4,512 for an annual season ticket (although he received a £200 discount this time for delays the previous year), which is likely to rise to £4,697 and could be as much as £4,953.

"We moved out two years ago, for some space, but we're both now questioning the wisdom. When the train works, it works fine. It takes an hour on the train, so with my fold-up bike it's an hour and 20 minutes door-to-door – I lived in London for 20 years and people commute for an hour across London.

"But the money you pay … my wife also commutes so it's over £9,000 between us. Sometimes it's a nightmare, and it's a nightmare at the moment. Whenever you get extremes of weather, hot or cold, things go wrong. Virtually every journey is delayed, it feels like. Pretty much every journey home was delayed last week and they just don't give you much information.

"If you knew before you got on the train how bad the problems were you'd go the pub instead. I've had a few journeys that have taken two to three hours to get home, where you've had to change trains, or you're stuck there because of signal failures.

"Going in from Hungerford to London at that time it's not so bad, you can usually get a seat. After Newbury and Reading it's busy. But coming home at night it's a lottery. Because people buying advance tickets get seat reservations, for regular commuters it's like Russian roulette. You grab a reserved seat and hope they don't turn up. As a four-and-a-half-grand ticket buyer, they don't make it easy for you. For delays you can claim money back if you then go and queue for a form at the ticket office, but we're all busy people.

"They really don't care. It's such a money-driven business. I get quite bitter about it. The rail network shouldn't be a privatised money-making thing, it should be there to serve the public."