I can fully understand your disappointment about the service to and from London Bridge since the New Year and I’ll try below to cover your specific points.

Firstly on the reinstatement of the West Croydon services - at the moment we can only confirm that these will remain out of the timetable for the next four weeks (as of the end of last week). There is understandably a reluctance to remove services from the timetable given how busy peak trains are but we decided this was necessary and we also made the changes on Monday so that trains that were planned to join up in London Bridge come in already fully formed (which reduces the number of movements into the station and reduces the time these trains spend in the platform). We are now working on a more permanent plan for the operation at London Bridge while Network Rail also reviews the capacity modelling and the method of operation to see how we can optimise it.

Since the station reopened the added delays and disruption particularly to peak services have stemmed mainly from reliability issues and the new layout. Some equipment, for example a set of points at a junction east of London Bridge station near New Cross Gate, has proved unreliable. We understand this equipment needs adjustments as it settles in and Network Rail has a team of engineers out each night checking this to ensure this equipment remains reliable. However, even without incidents the revised infrastructure has struggled to deliver the timetable. In terms of your point about predicting these events, modelling of the new reduced track layout showed that we should be able to run a maximum of 22 trains per hour. However we have found that trains gradually become later during the peaks because minor delays lead to trains quickly queuing at the station which then creates more significant delays. In practice therefore, we have simply not been able to get this number of trains into and out of London Bridge successfully during peak hours despite amending the train service in anticipation of the infrastructure reduction.

Finally, can I assure you that my colleagues are working very hard on an alternative plan for this and as soon as I have something that I can share I will be in touch.