Long delays on the Southern service in to London Bridge again this morning. That's now 5 out of 5 journeys to and from work this week...

As well as the obvious annoyance at spending substantial amounts of time waiting for trains, I'm pretty frustrated at the 'delay repay' policy which requires trains to be more than 30 minutes late before I am able to claim compensation. Whilst this may be sensible for longer journeys, the short journey time we have from Forest Hill means the train can take more than double the time it should do (50mins rather than advertised 24mins) and still be ineligible for compensation.

I might be being cynical, but I wonder whether the order in which trains are awarded a platform at London Bridge is at least partly driven by limiting compensation due to passengers. This would explain why the 08:21 seems to be held outside London Bridge until it is around 25 minutes late, at which point a platform is generally found.

I plan to be much more proactive this year in claiming compensation from Southern in the (vain) hope that an increase in compensation claims when trains on our line are late increases the priority that they are given. Does anyone on this forum regularly claim compensation from Southern?

Sadly though, I agree with squashst's comment that the delays are a pretty much inevitable consequence of reducing the number of tracks without reducing the number of trains.