CENTRAL Trains passengers are being urged to stay in their seats in protest when trains unexpectedly terminate.

Leaflets telling them not to leave the carriage when services are cut short have been handed out to travellers by a rail user fed up with cancellations.

Joan Sorensen started the campaign after an incident on Friday when a sit-down protest took place on a Hereford-bound train following an announcement it would be terminating at Great Malvern.

The 11am service from Birmingham, which was running 40 minutes late, had stopped at Great Malvern with the intention of off-loading passengers.

But Miss Sorensen, 33, and fellow passenger Elizabeth Baker, 80, confronted a guard before urging travellers to stay in their seats to force the train to keep going.

Miss Sorensen, of Lang-lands, Ledbury, said: "We told the ticket collector that no-one would be leaving the train at Great Malvern, in protest we would all remain seated.

"We then calmly re-turned to our seats, and before we had a chance to sit down, it was announced that our train would be going to Hereford after all.

"All people on all carriages cheered and clapped. We were heroes, as we had stood up to Central Trains!"

Mrs Baker said her husband, who worked as a train driver for nearly 50 years, had told her train operators are fined for turning up late to Hereford. She suspected that was the reason for terminating the train.

Miss Sorensen distributed leaflets detailing the protest to passengers on another Hereford-bound service that terminated in Ledbury on Monday.

Another protest was staged with several people staying on the train for half an hour, but this time the train did not continue on its original route.

Central Trains spokes-man Claire Barrett said it has no record of Friday's protest and the decision to carry on was not influenced by passengers' actions.

She said the original intention had been to transfer the passengers to another train that would have reached Hereford more quickly, but it was then decided the move would slow the other service down too much.

She said Central is charged more for cancelling services than it is for running late.