Letter: My SWT Experiences Don’t Match Up

Published on: 8 Dec, 2016
Updated on: 8 Dec, 2016

From Barbara Ford

In response to: Letter: Yes, The Train Services Have Improved, But… and Letter: I Say The Train Service Isn’t Too Bad

SWT is obviously better out of rush hour.

I commute regularly to Waterloo from Guildford and have a completely different experience from that of your previous correspondents: in the mornings there are rarely any seats at all on any train before 8am (6.20 am is beyond me) and hardly any second class seats on those between 8 and 8.30am.

It is a similar situation on the return journey – though occasionally one can be lucky and find that the two people sitting on the outside seats of a block of three are not so fat that one cannot breathe once one has managed to wedge oneself in. On Tuesday evening they were both slim, hooray!

All too often, particularly for the return journey, two days out of five one has first to pay penance for the pleasure of the day’s work by standing on the concourse for 30-40 minutes while trains are delayed or cancelled for a variety of increasingly imaginative reasons: recently we were told that there was a swan on the line!

As well as the usual signalling breakdowns, there are often “poor railhead conditions”, which seems to be SWTspeak for “cold weather” (which clearly has not occurred in Britain before, any more than those leaves on the line, so the trains could not be designed to cope with it).

The only advantage is that it all helps reconcile one to approaching retirement.