LETTER: When it goes wrong it goes really wrong

In response to your article asking about our train experiences, I commute from Lewes to London Bridge every day.
By The Newsroom
Published 28th Jan 2016, 15:00 BST

On the whole it normally works ok (not good but ok) the train is always ten minutes late into London Bridge and I just seem to have to live with that.

But, when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. A lot of customers seem to let Southern off as most of the problems originate with network rail issues (signal failure, etc), but the chaos that always follows is down to Southern.

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They don’t seem to have any slack in either trains or drivers and very little in the way of contingency planning, so they take all day to recover from a simple problem.

That is why they should not run the franchise. In the public sector, the money Southern are currently paying to share holders could be used to employ spare drivers and lease spare trains.

Just last week, a train failure resulted in every journey that rolling stock was due to be used for being cancelled, they could not find even one spare train.

Dave Parkyns

Kingston Road, Lewes