If anyone's interested: my email to Southern and their response -

"Could you please tell me what's happened to the morning service (specifically the 8.53 and around that time) from Forest Hill to London Bridge? It's always been pretty reliable, but over the last month or so it's been increasingly erratic, often late or cancelled, leading to extreme overcrowding. I'm sure you've had a million emails about this morning's total debacle, but it's only the worst example of a real and obvious decline in the service over the last month or so.

What's happened?

And what compensation can I claim for consistently late trains when I travel using a zone 1 to 3 monthly oyster card?"

Reply:

"Thank you for your email I can understand the frustration caused by the recent poor performance of your trains from Forest Hill to London Bridge. We always try make announcements about cancellations as early as we can. We do everything we can to run every service and only cancel trains when we have no other options. When a train is cancelled because we can't get a driver or guard for a train, it can sometimes be almost the last minute before we know. We are very sorry for the trouble this causes. I would explain there is a huge variety of reasons why delays can occur. They can be rooted in railway operational problems such as defects on trains, signalling and track problems, staffing difficulties, or they can arise from the very nature of the job we are trying to do. At the heart of all this is the timetable. It has to have a theoretical starting point and we include as many trains as we can, even to the extent that our planners actually work in half-minutes. Like most networks radiating from London, the Southern territory is an intricate web of interconnecting lines and junctions where the timetable has to be designed around crucial dovetailing of services on many different routes. However, there is a difference between theory and practice and that is where things can often go wrong. Most of our trains have to funnel through Gatwick Airport, Clapham Junction, East Croydon or in and out of London Bridge, and the combined frequencies are such that even a small delay at the wrong time can quickly mushroom into a much larger problem. For much of the time, therefore, these delays are often simply the knock-on effect of close scheduling on heavily used routes. That said, we have not thrown in the towel. Directors and senior managers are driving a number of ongoing initiatives aimed at supporting all staff at the operational level in focussing tightly on the relentless and repetitive but essential detail of the operation, day in day out. The regulatory authorities judge train company performance in a number of ways. One of these is punctuality and one of the critical targets in avoiding penalties is to get peak hour trains into their termini no more than four minutes late. Amongst these initiatives, therefore, has been an ongoing campaign which has as its key emphasis the crucial importance of right time departures from origin stations and stations en route. This is backed up by a daily director- level conference each morning which reviews that morning's peak and the previous day's evening peak, with particular emphasis on any incidents and how they were resolved. There is also daily monitoring of known "bad runners" at various points en-route and regular practical assistance to local staff by managers and supervisors who might otherwise be office-based. I would like to assure you we will continue to work to improve train punctuality and reliability and the overall quality of our operation. Our results are published on our Passenger Charter posters, which are always displayed at most stations I hope that from the efforts mentioned above you will soon start to see some tangible improvement in the running of your service. As part of our commitments to you in our Passenger's Charter we have an automatic compensation scheme for our season ticket holders. Basically this means that if we fail to meet the advertised targets for running trains on time, or for keeping cancellations to a minimum, then we give you a discount when you renew your ticket. However, in order to guard against giving un-earned discount, such renewals have to be on a like-for-like basis. Moreover, as part of this process, you will understand that we do not then give additional compensation for any individual delay. To explain a little about how this is calculated, our achievements on running trains on time (referred to as 'punctuality') and keeping cancellations to a minimum ('reliability') are worked out every four weeks. This is then added to the previous twelve periods' figures and the average is calculated. If this average is below the set target, then we discount monthly or longer tickets if they are renewed within the following four weeks. The discount is 5% for each category (punctuality and reliability) and 10% will be given if both are below target."