Thanks to everybody who stopped by. I really think it made an impression on Southern staff including Chris Burchill, Managing Director of Southern - who was present alongside representatives from Network Rail, and Caroline Pidgeon, chair of the GLA transport committee.

Chris was upset that the newspapers were portraying these changes as cuts. They are apparently not 'cuts', just changes to the start, end and mid points of journeys. hmmm

All their answers came down to 'it's not our fault, we are told which trains to run and to where, we have no flexibility over services, and there are lots of other demands on the line'.

Our next step will be to ask for a meeting with the DfT. I managed to get Southern representatives to agree that they would like to run 6 trains per hour in the evening if they were allowed to, similarly they would like to be able to run trains to Charing Cross. They did ask for these in the franchise consultation. So now we need to persuade DfT that there is no sense in running 8 trains on the East London Line to Forest Hill and only 6 trains from London Bridge.

The Charing Cross service will be even harder to save but the easy answer (from my perspective) is to open Cannon Street station after 8pm so that the South Eastern services can continue to use this route rather than pinching our routes.

There was a general consensus that we should be extending platforms to 12 carriages rather than stopping at 10 carriages prior to 2012. Southern would like platforms 'as long as possible' and would like to run 12 carriage trains if it were possible to do so. Caroline Pidgeon seemed particularly interested in the possibility of taking the platform lengths to 12 carriages. So we shall be pursuing this over the next couple of years.