Passengers continue to have issues with the reliability of Southern Railways services following the introduction of the new timetable on May 20. The first service failure was on May 31 but it was quickly followed by similar failures on June 6 and 13. There have been other service outages but these have been as a result of trespass on the line or (on Tuesday of this week, June 26) a fire at Eastbourne – but the MarshLink Action Group (MLAG) does not blame Southern for service problems outside its control.
But, as advised in MLAG’s press release of May 31, published in Rye News on June 1, we were looking for Southern to explain the issues that gave rise to the service failures and advise us what they were doing to mitigate problems in the future. This is particularly irritating since we reasonably expected an increase in service reliability to be one dividend for the shortening of the length of the MarshLink service (from Ashford – Brighton to Ashford – Eastbourne) and therefore the availability of an additional unit operating the MarshLink service.
Having received inadequate responses, MLAG raised the matter at a meeting with Southern this week to discuss a range of issues with the new service and this matter was high on our agenda. We intend to publish the response we receive.
As to the other issues discussed, these will be reported on in due course.
Photos: library images
Image Credits: John Minter .