Transport Insights

Many people working in this week or so between Christmas and New Year are having to wait longer for trains, not because of engineering works, but because the service has been intentionally made worse, despite Labour’s claim to be putting passengers first.

For example, trains to and from London from where I live in Epsom have been cut from one every fifteen minutes in the rush hour to one every half hour – and that goes for both Southern trains to and from Victoria and SWR trains to and from Waterloo.

As far as I can tell, in at least the case of Southern, there is no impact from engineering works; the company is just choosing to save money by running fewer trains, based on assumptions that fewer people will be travelling.

Those people are not paying any less to have a worse service and the peak time charges have not been waived.

And the trains are still overcrowded.

Another problem is that if you cut the frequency of the trains and then cancel one, as Southern did yesterday, a fifteen-minute wait can become an hour.

This says a lot about the state of our railways today, with cost-cutting instead of an attempt to run the best service possible. A total lack of imagination about the benefits of giving customers a service where they feel valued.