Well done Michael. How right you are that we are so often badly served locally by the railway industry. Let's hope things improve when TfL take over in September.
Referring to the news article mentioned above by Elizabeth, I was amazed when I looked on the Office of the Rail Regulator's website to see the high number of passengers using our local rail stations. ORR figures are from June 2007 and are based on the number of people entering and leaving each station p.a.:
Forest Hill 3,014,902
Sydenham 2,139,553
HOP 1,582,305
Brockley 2,019,575
In other words there are over 8 million passenger journeys to and from our local rail stations each year and yet the facilities at those stations are often crude and inadequate. In comparison Swindon, as an example, has 2.5m passenger journeys p.a. (less than FH) but incomparably better facilities for those passengers.
We need to see huge improvements locally - and we certainly don't need to find that station entrances and exits are blocked to passengers by totally unacceptable planning of building works.