Used to do this every day and still do occasionally. Your observations are all correct. There is another thing that Southern are apt to do, and sadly you can expect more of this in winter, is run trains fast through stops like Forest Hill and Honor Oak Park - this means they catch up on lost time when there are delays and exploit a loophole where they can claim the train did run even though the advertised service did not.

All of these issues, IMO, stem from the same cause: they have only a few minutes timetabled to turn the trains round. This means that there is no slack to absorb delays.

There used to be a c. 1800 from East Croydon but it was so often delayed or cancelled that I think they dropped it from the timetable altogether. There was an issue logged with FixMyTransport but it didn't get anywhere.

Have tried comnunicating with Southern on all this but frankly they need to run more trains to sort this and they don't show much enthusiasm for this. I hope you have better luck but am hoping the new combined franchise goes to a company that is a little more passenger focused.

This post was last modified: 15-10-2013 09:19 AM by lacb.