PASSENGER campaigners slammed ministers for “rewarding failure” yesterday after Britain’s most unpopular train company was handed a three-and-a-half-year franchise extension.

FirstGroup’s First Great Western, which operates services from London to the Thames Valley, south Wales and south-west England, received 45,100 complaints via social media last year — the largest volume of any privateer railway.

But just six weeks before the general election, the Con-Dem government has kept the shambolic set-up on the rails.