MOST advertisements on public transport attempt to sell something. Travellers on the London Underground, for example, sit under posters for dating websites, vitamin supplements and insurance policies. On the two-carriage train between Sunderland and Darlington in the north-east of England, only one advert catches the eye. It is from the rail company, apparently apologising for the state the train is in.

The north-east’s railway network is creaking. Two or three-car “Pacers”—cheaply-made carriages based on old buses—judder along large parts of the network. It can take an hour and a half to get from Middlesbrough to Newcastle, a distance of only 40 miles. A train journey between Chelmsford in Essex and London, the same distance, takes 36 minutes. Trains from rich suburbs are less frequent and are often delayed. “You could walk faster,” complains David Budd, the deputy mayor of Middlesbrough.

This is crippling labour mobility in England’s poorest region. The north-east was long dependent on heavy industry and has struggled with deindustrialisation. Unemployment in Middlesbrough, at 15%, is twice the national average (see map). But because the north-east is so hard to get around, companies must recruit locally, says Paul Callaghan, chairman of the Leighton Group, a technology firm just outside Sunderland. The south-east’s excellent transport links enable people to travel much more easily.

History is partly to blame. Newcastle aside, many towns in the north-east were self-contained and oriented around mines: few people needed to travel far. Railways mostly carried coal and steel, and when those industries declined they were cut back. Even new jobs were often isolated in suburban industrial parks. What little investment there was in transport tended to reinforce older north-south links rather than create new east-west ones. Local government squabbling has not helped matters. “There’s an antipathy between Newcastle and Sunderland—and not just about football,” says Ray Hudson of Durham University. In metropolitan Manchester, local authorities have ganged up to lobby for investment. The north-east has failed to present a united front. Partly as a result, public expenditure on transport infrastructure projects is £2,595 ($4,340) per head in London but only £5 in the north-east, according to IPPR North, a think-tank. Britain’s proposed high-speed railway will not help much, and not for a long time. Under current plans HS2 will take until 2033 to reach the north-east, some seven years after it stretches to the West Midlands. Even then many are worried: Edward Twiddy, leader of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, fears that journeys to Leeds in Yorkshire will become longer and that investment will be drawn away from the East Coast mainline. Smaller, incremental projects would help more. Railway tracks are being electrified in the north-west, but only as far as York. Unless parts of the north-east are electrified too, areas like Middlesbrough risk being cut off even more than at present. Better rolling-stock would get more people on trains. If another platform were added to Darlington station—a pretty, if sparse, Victorian structure—then congestion on the line to London would be reduced, as local and freight services would no longer need to cross the main tracks.

Such projects are less exciting than a whizzy new railway. Government officials tend to glaze over when they are mentioned, says Ed Cox of IPPR North. A more integrated approach to transport planning would help. This is slowly starting to happen: from April 1st seven local authorities in the north-east will hive off some functions to a combined authority, similar to the set-up in Manchester. This should give the north-east a stronger voice. When two northern rail franchises come up for renewal in 2016 local authorities will play a larger part in the bidding process.

In many ways the region is lagging 20 years behind everywhere else, thinks Penny Marshall, the regional director of the Institution of Civil Engineers in the north-east. Though car ownership per head is low, it is catching up with the national average. The shabbiness of public transport is pushing people onto crowded roads. “It would be nice to get it right before it gets worse,” she says.