MP Owen Paterson has urged Arriva Trains Wales to look at improving its current services before expanding to provide a direct route from Mid Wales and Shropshire to London.

Mr Paterson has criticised the company’s proposals, which if given the go-ahead, would be direct competition for the Wrexham, Shropshire and Marylebone Railway. The Tory MP for North Shropshire has praised the WSMR service.

But he said, as it has only been going for one year, it still needed time to “bed in”.

He said it was an “absolute coup” for Shropshire, had recruited county staff, had “exceptional” catering and was so popular he had struggled to get a seat on occasions.

But he hit out at Arriva Trains Wales for proposing a rival service and appealed for the firm to wait until 2012 to give WSMR time to get its journey speeds up to two-and-a-half hours.

He said: “I would like to see this service allowed to bed down. It is still slow, it needs to get its running time up. We are in a very deep miserable recession to be setting up a service. It is budgeted to make a loss in its first year, it needs time to bed in.”

Mr Paterson’s comments come after an announcement by Virgin Trains this month that it had dropped its plans for a rival service.

“I am pleased Virgin backed off and would like Arriva to wait until 2012,” he said.

An ATW spokesman said: “We are looking to run two additional trains between Aberystwyth and London Marylebone. There is currently no direct service from Mid Wales to London.”

He said six trains a day between Shrewsbury and Telford would not be an overkill on the market.

But Mr Paterson claimed it would be a “very inadequate service” and ATW should instead improve its own service. “Get your act together, get your own reliability up and get more trains in your patch,” he said.

Afterwards an ATW spokeswoman said a consultation had been held on the proposals and it had “quite a positive response.” She said it was now preparing a submission to the Office of Rail Regulation.