Operator is bottom of new passenger satisfaction survey

Southeastern, which runs services between Hastings and Charing Cross, scored 72 percent for overall satisfaction - the lowest in the whole of the country.

The survey was carried out over the same two month period which saw 124 incidents on the Southeastern network which related to landslips and poor weather conditions.

The Hastings line was closed for eight weeks because of landslips at Battle, Whatlington and Stonegate.

Speed restrictions were put in place at 33 different locations across Kent, London and East Sussex.

These incidents had an impact across the network, leading to cancelled services, delayed journeys and overcrowded trains.

Southeastern referred Network Rail, the organisation responsible for tracks and signalling, to the Office of Rail Regulation to seek urgent action to improve punctuality and reliability on the network in the aftermath of the winter disruption.

Charles Horton, managing director of Southeastern, said: “We’re not surprised that our customers have responded to the survey in this way as we too were frustrated by the problems that hampered services over the winter. We’ve taken on board comments from customers about how we handled the disruption and made improvements to our website, with more in the pipeline; appointed a dedicated manager to oversee contingency planning; and started work to identify where we can improve in other areas.”

“We were pleased to see that the hard work of our frontline teams is recognised in the survey through improved scores for helpfulness and availability of staff. We recognise that we have more work to do and we’ll be concentrating our efforts on delivering improvements over the coming months.”