The rolling stock itself and the colour scheme is one of the few things I like about Southern. I used to have a fair regard for all the south London operators but in practice, I'm finding all the Govia operators suffering pretty dreadful punctuality every time I use them, but the least bad in my experience is actually Southeastern, despite the negative press. Southern's trains are nice, or were once, they quite often seem pretty dirty, and the delays, and particular delay management (or lack thereof) are horrendous. Thameslink is worse still but only being a core user, the routine delays tend not to impact me that much. I doubt very much any of these will change as it seems more down to the complexity of the networks than anything else, but being absolutely useless to the customer when delays do occur, is something I'd like to see change!
Being sat on a train service at Victoria that runs at least 3 or 4 times an hour, for half an hour, sitting through three calling point changes, with no announcements about my destination from the concourse PA whatsoever, only to be told 2 mins before its eventual departure it was going entirely elsewhere was frustrating beyond belief. Luckily it wasn't too far a walk from a tube station instead. Delays happen, but that was dire. I've travelled with Southern several times since, every occasion being between 5-15 minutes late. Not exactly disastrous, but compared to other operators that get a lot of stick for lateness (ahem), at present, I'm far from impressed. Still, at least their fares seem pretty reasonable.
