Thought that some people would be interested in Southern's response concerning the Rail Replacement Service, here are their findings!!

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We at Southern do appreciate the frustration caused by engineering works in the London Bridge area. These are part of the improvements taking place for the Thameslink Programme (http://www.thameslinkprogramme.co.uk), which is overseen by the Department for Transport. Even without engineering works taking place such as those between London Bridge and East Croydon on the 6 and 13 September 2014, we are currently having to contend with reduced platform capacity at London Bridge (a Network Rail managed station) as part of these works. This has created an even tighter bottleneck in an inherently tight and high-demand network. Nonetheless, ensuring that there is an adequate replacement bus service to cover our routes is our responsibility, so I passed your comments to the Short Term Planner.

He advises that we had a bus running every 15 minutes on the route you travelled all day long. Along with this, we also had a standby bus, which can be used if there is overcrowding. There has not as yet been any previous feedback that buses are overcrowded and he cannot recall seeing anything from his logs on the days in question that there was an issue with overcrowding on the buses.

The bus supplier believes that the problem is not so much the number of buses in circulation but that they are running late, which causes ‘bunching’ and hence overloading at times. They are currently looking at the timings for these replacement services although in any case, they are subject to traffic delays, no matter how many buses are deployed, not to mention the difficult roads they may have to negotiate.

One solution that is being considered is to introduce some extra bus resources across the centre of the service, around the New Cross Gate to Crystal Palace area. This would not alleviate the late running issue but would give some respite across the centre section of the route in question, allowing the ‘through’ services to operate more speedily. This would involve sourcing additional staff to run the services but it is believed that this may ease the situation.

Rest assured that your feedback is much appreciated and was naturally passed on in the process of speaking to the Short Term Planner and the bus supplier. Your comments may therefore be referred to when implementing any changes to replacement services across our Metro East route, although I cannot promise an immediate fix for reasons I have explained above. I do however hope that you experience a significant improvement in the near future, whenever we have to deploy replacement buses on this route.