GTR cancellations including not operating from Victoria until 10th Jan

[infobleep]

Normally at local depot level using existing diagrams and train services. Occasionally they have run route learning special empties but these will very rare these days

Obviously the existing diagrams is the rollover timetable with some modifications.

 

[physics34]

Obviously the existing diagrams is the rollover timetable with some modifications.

Yes thats it

 

[Watershed]

Why on earth don't they have adequate planning resources to replan a more appropriate timetable after almost three weeks when there was a perfectly good although heavily reduced (especially on the normally extensively served Victoria to Gatwick and Brighton line) service timetable that ran for 7 or so months in 2020 that they surely could have got up and running again within a few days in the week starting Tuesday 4th Jan and that timetable did not divert initially all and then subsequently still the vast majority of services in to London Bridge and also ran a shuttle service from Dorking to Horsham at off peak times including Saturday evening. The only logical reason to divert to London Bridge originally over Christmas Week was because of engineering works on the lines in to London Victoria but that reason disappeared on Tuesday January 4th yet still the diversions to London Bridge and still the ridiculous last train out to Horsham via Dorking at 1725 every day continues. Also absurdly I notice that on that slightly amended (just one additional early morning service) Saturday timetable the first train from London Bridge to Ockley is at 0725 but the first regular hourly train from Ockley to London Victoria is at 0824 after the isolated 0600 service converted from a normally out of service train from Horsham to Victoria on a Saturday. So clearly they think this timetable is only designed for walkers going out to Surrey for the day and not for people going in to London on a weekday to use hospitals, undertake urgent business tasks and the like.

Had my LinkedIn profile viewed a few days ago by a person who describes themselves as being an "Amended Timetable and Rolling Stock Planner at GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway)" on their LinkedIn profile but of course no contact at all by that person by phone or email to discuss my issues with the train planning team. Only phone interactions I have had have been with Teleperformance customer service call centre in Bristol, who effectively don't have any proper knowledge or understanding of the Southern network and its amended service patterns of any kind (they don't even know or seem to care where any of the stations are located geographically) and a call back from a lady who is some kind of Customer Liaison Person with GT Railway, who could offer me no specific explanation or justification for why Southern is doing what it is doing running a Saturday service with no evening service south of Dorking for weeks on end while not even offering to pay for a replacement taxi south of Dorking at times of day when trains would normally run on a weekday.

The mask mandate and work from home edicts are all going by this time next week and recorded Omicron infections and therefore Southern/GT Railway staff absences will also be falling fast. Yet despite that normal service still not listed as returning on the current Southern journey planner until Monday 21st Feb some four and a half weeks from.

Seems GT Railway and the Department For Transport are in a conspiracy to recoup past financial losses during COVID from rail users using the excuse of Omicron. Any claims they didn't initially have enough staff working to plan a more appropriate timetable than the Christmas Saturday timetable are surelynow long since busted in terms of any credibility.

I think you significantly underestimate the scale of the task of instating a reduced base timetable, and the consequences of diverting resources into replanning weeks that have already been "sorted" (even if not in an ideal manner by any means).

Unless you want timescales for future blockades to be very tight, you have little choice but to leave the existing timetable as it is, and to wait until after the Copyhold Jn block for the next significant uplift.

It's just like traincrew. In an ideal world you would have sufficient spare capacity that when contingencies arise, the customer experience isn't impacted too heavily. But nobody is going to sign off on 'unnecessarily' having people sit around most of the time. So things are run as a tight ship - which is fine normally, but really doesn't work when the brown stuff hits the fan.

There is certainly a degree of DfT meddling in all of this, but ultimately even if money was no object, there simply aren't enough people with the skills and knowledge to fix the situation any quicker.

 

[maniacmartin]

I think a lot of the replies in this thread miss the main point. It was been predicted many months ago that Covid was likely to flare up again in the winter, so why did GTR not have a plan in place for what to do if they had significant staff shortages? There should have been no need to do "replanning" at short notice if they had had a bit more foresight.

 

[Bald Rick]

I think a lot of the replies in this thread miss the main point. It was been predicted many months ago that Covid was likely to flare up again in the winter, so why did GTR not have a plan in place for what to do if they had significant staff shortages? There should have been no need to do "replanning" at short notice if they had had a bit more foresight.

They would have replanning to do - it’s replanning the diagrams and rosters that is the tricky bit. And the two key variables are -how many people are off, and when exactly are they going to be off. If you could have predicted that months ago, you should go and buy a lottery ticket.

 

[IrishDave]

Why on earth don't they have adequate planning resources to replan a more appropriate timetable after almost three weeks when there was a perfectly good although heavily reduced (especially on the normally extensively served Victoria to Gatwick and Brighton line) service timetable that ran for 7 or so months in 2020 that they surely could have got up and running again within a few days in the week starting Tuesday 4th Jan and that timetable did not divert initially all and then subsequently still the vast majority of services in to London Bridge and also ran a shuttle service from Dorking to Horsham at off peak times including Saturday evening.

Firstly, there isn't the timetable planning resource to replan the entire Brighton Main Line in three weeks. In normal times, a timetable planning team is usually kept busy just with the usual alterations for engineering works each weekend - some weeks will obviously be more complicated than others, but it'll generally balance out. GTR's timetable planning team is presumably similar in size to what it was pre-covid - perhaps a little larger if they've managed to recruit, but it takes time to train up planners - and for most of the last two years all the people who could be training new planners have been firefighting. The team over the last three weeks will have been busy planning for the blockade timetable for 19-27 February, or else beyond that if they're lucky enough to have got all that done in good time.

Secondly, the same timetable didn't run for 7 months or so in 2020. There was a quite substantial change at the May 2020 timetable change, as the Gatwick works started on schedule. That meant reworking the timetable and although it may have appeared to be largely the same, it wasn't. (Indeed, there were quite a lot of changes to 387 diagrams in particular - from May 2020 they started appearing on the East Coastway between Brighton and Hastings/Ore.)

Thirdly, in any case you couldn't resurrect that timetable today - because things have moved on in the meantime. The Gatwick works have moved on to a different phase, with Platform 7 having reopened and Platform 5 having closed. Thameslink paths on the Midland Main Line changed significantly in May 2021 as part of the East Midlands Railway timetable recast, so there's no possibility of going back to anything from pre-May 2021 without changing EMR trains (which simply wouldn't fit with the old timetable). You can't go back to an old timetable any more than you can replan the whole thing on the spot. And piecing together a timetable - say by putting current Thameslink paths together with the May 2020 reduced Southern timetable - would take just as much work in validating the timetable before it can run.

I think a lot of the replies in this thread miss the main point. It was been predicted many months ago that Covid was likely to flare up again in the winter, so why did GTR not have a plan in place for what to do if they had significant staff shortages? There should have been no need to do "replanning" at short notice if they had had a bit more foresight.

Because that, too, would take timetable planning resource that doesn't exist. There was no time to create contingency plans any more than there was to create a new base timetable.

Furthermore, it appears that the omicron wave has affected the South London Metro driver depots more significantly than the driver depots further south - after all, the overall frequencies south of Croydon are largely similar to normal (admittedly with discrepancies like Dorking-Horsham), whereas running such a limited Metro service must mean they're saving a huge number of Metro drivers at the minute. Could you have predicted that a plan would have been needed for significant staff shortages in one part of the network but not others? If they did have an off-the-shelf plan to deal with staff shortages, it was probably predicated on a level of absence that was fairly uniform across all depots - which would not have been terribly useful in the present scenario.

Let me be clear: I don't like the present timetable. It's an awful, horrendous fudge. But I genuinely believe it's the best that could be done at short notice. By the end of February, the blockade will be done and hopefully we'll be back to something closer to normality.

 

[Surreytraveller]

I think a lot of the replies in this thread miss the main point. It was been predicted many months ago that Covid was likely to flare up again in the winter, so why did GTR not have a plan in place for what to do if they had significant staff shortages? There should have been no need to do "replanning" at short notice if they had had a bit more foresight.

You cannot just flick a switch and change to a different timetable tomorrow

 

[Watershed]

I think a lot of the replies in this thread miss the main point. It was been predicted many months ago that Covid was likely to flare up again in the winter, so why did GTR not have a plan in place for what to do if they had significant staff shortages? There should have been no need to do "replanning" at short notice if they had had a bit more foresight.

Even if you had such a plan nominally available - and I agree that this would probably be a sensible suggestion, although there also isn't the resource to come up with additional plans that sit on the shelf - implementing it would still require a lot of work.

It's not as simple as copy and paste; at the very least, you need to validate that your new paths and platforming work in conjunction with what other operators are doing.

Moreover, unless this plan entails a drastic reduction across the board, it will be of no help if one particular depot or area suffers higher absence/unavailability. Of course, because it's all a large jigsaw, that will have knock-on effects.

With the number of timetable changes that have happened over the last 2 years, and the many which no doubt lie ahead, frankly most TOCs could benefit from a substantial increase in their planning resource. An extra, say, 300 people across the industry would have a massive cost benefit ratio IMHO.

Of course, as the government currently sees the railway as a liability, that is not going to happen.

 

[zwk500]

With the number of timetable changes that have happened over the last 2 years, and the many which no doubt lie ahead, frankly most TOCs could benefit from a substantial increase in their planning resource. An extra, say, 300 people across the industry would have a massive cost benefit ratio IMHO.

Of course, as the government currently sees the railway as a liability, that is not going to happen.

Unfortunately, you are 100% correct on both points.

 

[Capvermell]

Even if you had such a plan nominally available - and I agree that this would probably be a sensible suggestion, although there also isn't the resource to come up with additional plans that sit on the shelf - implementing it would still require a lot of work.

But strangely there were enough Amended Timetable and Rolling Stock Planners and Amended Traincrew Diagram Planners (I would love somebody to explain to me the actual work of a Traincrew Diagrammer since I have never seen one of these Diagrams whereas I do know what a timetable looks like) to flip over on almost no notice to running the Christmas Week engineering timetable in to the following post Christmas weeks when clearly on shared stretches of line like Epsom to Dorking the companies who shared the lines with Southern (SouthWestern in this case) would not have been running the services being run during the christmas week engineering works (a Saturday timetable) but some other service pattern. And in Spring 2020 there were enough Amended Timetable and Rolling Stock Planners and Amended Traincrew Diagram Planners to develop a completely different lockdown period timetable in very little time indeed (the new much reduced service just came in very quickly and there wasn't a period with no trains at all running while it was planned out due to all the huge amounts of work apparently involved). Also aren't jobs like Amended Traincrew Diagram Planner and Amended Timetable and Rolling Stock Planner jobs that be can done working from home online on a computer meaning they could then even potentially be done while someone is self isolating? Whereas obviously a train driver and train supervisor, station supervisor and even a train cleaner's job cannot be done while they are self isolating.

But here the mentality seems to have been its only going to be 7 weeks (I think those doing these jobs knew that at the outset) until the Blockade period (not that Dorking to Horsham is on the blockaded Main Line of course) and there's a work from home guidance on anyway (which they rashly and wrongly assumed would last the whole period) so the Christmas week timetable will do.

I highlighted a pretty unacceptable consequence of rolling on Saturday services for weeks from Dorking to Horsham that actually comes out of the fact that the Saturday service on the line is its one aspect still stuck in the immediate post Beeching era (is there any way for me to access old timetables on the line from the 1930s to 1980s without a trip to the national records office at Kew, where I believe they are held on paper, to find out when all Saturday evening service and Sunday services from Dorking to Horsham were lost) and yet nothing was done to fix a simple problem with Saturday evening services on a short 15 mile stretch of line with only three intermediate stops that has needed dealing with for a very long time. Southern/GoVia have also been so mean spirited that they wouldn't even officially authorise the station supervisor at Dorking to pay the taxi costs of what would have been only a comparatively small number of people left stranded at Dorking. Alternatively running additional trains on the Saturday timetable running on weekdays from London Bridge to Horsham via Dorking at 1825 and 1925 and converting the out of service and running empty 2255 movement to Horsham in to passenger service would have catered for most passenger journeys needing to be made on the line. But no instead just continue to run the completely inadequate for a weekday Saturday evening service regardless of my own efforts to raise the issue here and with Southern customer service (I raised a complaint with the Teleperformance telephone contact centre two weeks ago and was promised a response from the train planning team but of course one has not been forthcoming) but do recognise there's a problem in the morning by bringing that very early out of service train to London Bridge in to passenger service...........

 

[75A]

They would have replanning to do - it’s replanning the diagrams and rosters that is the tricky bit. And the two key variables are -how many people are off, and when exactly are they going to be off. If you could have predicted that months ago, you should go and buy a lottery ticket.

A very sensible answer, I don't think those on the outside understand what's involved and certainly don't get the 'big picture' concept.

 

[Capvermell]

I don't think those on the outside understand what's involved and certainly don't get the 'big picture' concept.

Where I can read an article or watch a video on what is involved in creating and revising a train timetable, train diagrams and associated crew rosters?

 

[30907]

I think a lot of the replies in this thread miss the main point. It was been predicted many months ago that Covid was likely to flare up again in the winter, so why did GTR not have a plan in place for what to do if they had significant staff shortages?

A detail: Government planned to "flatten the winter curve" by easing restrictions in July and tolerating large numbers of cases (actually 30k-ish) and hospital admissions (800-ish) per day, 14x and 7x the low point in May. By their criteria a success until Omicron arrived in December (having started in the South African spring BTW).

 

[Horizon22]

Even if you had such a plan nominally available - and I agree that this would probably be a sensible suggestion, although there also isn't the resource to come up with additional plans that sit on the shelf - implementing it would still require a lot of work.

It's not as simple as copy and paste; at the very least, you need to validate that your new paths and platforming work in conjunction with what other operators are doing.

Moreover, unless this plan entails a drastic reduction across the board, it will be of no help if one particular depot or area suffers higher absence/unavailability. Of course, because it's all a large jigsaw, that will have knock-on effects.

With the number of timetable changes that have happened over the last 2 years, and the many which no doubt lie ahead, frankly most TOCs could benefit from a substantial increase in their planning resource. An extra, say, 300 people across the industry would have a massive cost benefit ratio IMHO.

Of course, as the government currently sees the railway as a liability, that is not going to happen.

The plan nominally available is the base timetable, or at least what was planned to run in Dec ‘21. That exists already. To mitigate specific issues, selective cancellations of diagrams will be required. It may take a few days to bed in to get stock aligned and crew diagrams prepared and synced. And yes, there will be some ad-hoc cancellations but hey, that’s literally what controllers are there to do - manage the train service (include service disruption). Wholescale, short-term planning is obviously not their job but they can certainly help given a suitable timescale.

There is a lot of “no resource to plan” but frankly besides SWR significantly cutting their service (and I don’t think that’s a planning issue), no TOC has so drastically changed their base timetable and I can’t see how GTR/Southern would be so more incapable than any other company in restoring services as surely control and planning capacity has increased significantly (just like crew has).

 

[London Trains]

At this point, the current timetable being ran makes little sense and it probably would be better to run a Saturday service with morning and evening alterations and some services removed.

Remove:
Gatwick Express
Victoria to Epsom
Victoria to Sutton via Norbury
Victoria to London Bridge
Victoria to Reigate
London Bridge to Caterham (slow)
London Bridge to Coulsdon Town (slow)

Changes:
Victoria to Horsham via Sutton services additionally call at Hackbridge, Mitcham Junction and Mitcham Eastfields
Redhill to Reigate shuttle

This basically reduces services by 2tph at most metro stations.

 

[Surreytraveller]

The plan nominally available is the base timetable, or at least what was planned to run in Dec ‘21. That exists already. To mitigate specific issues, selective cancellations of diagrams will be required. It may take a few days to bed in to get stock aligned and crew diagrams prepared and synced. And yes, there will be some ad-hoc cancellations but hey, that’s literally what controllers are there to do - manage the train service (include service disruption). Wholescale, short-term planning is obviously not their job but they can certainly help given a suitable timescale.

There is a lot of “no resource to plan” but frankly besides SWR significantly cutting their service (and I don’t think that’s a planning issue), no TOC has so drastically changed their base timetable and I can’t see how GTR/Southern would be so more incapable than any other company in restoring services as surely control and planning capacity has increased significantly (just like crew has).

It doesn't take a few days. It takes weeks. You cannot just arbitrarily remove stock or crew diagrams, as that will cause trains and drivers to be sat at inconvenient locations waiting relief. That's what caused the May 2018 mayhem.

At this point, the current timetable being ran makes little sense and it probably would be better to run a Saturday service with morning and evening alterations and some services removed.

Remove:
Gatwick Express
Victoria to Epsom
Victoria to Sutton via Norbury
Victoria to London Bridge
Victoria to Reigate
London Bridge to Caterham (slow)
London Bridge to Coulsdon Town (slow)

Changes:
Victoria to Horsham via Sutton services additionally call at Hackbridge, Mitcham Junction and Mitcham Eastfields
Redhill to Reigate shuttle

This basically reduces services by 2tph at most metro stations.

Again, your post shows little understanding of how the railway operates. Crews and stock do not stay on one route during the day. Both stock and crews interwork between different routes. Even a Gatwick Express driver will work to Haywards Heath on a Gatwick Express train, then work a Southern Eastbourne to Victoria train up to East Croydon
It is nowhere as simple as people think

 

[Horizon22]

It doesn't take a few days. It takes weeks. You cannot just arbitrarily remove stock or crew diagrams, as that will cause trains and drivers to be sat at inconvenient locations waiting relief. That's what caused the May 2018 mayhem.

It simply isn't true because I've had to do it before. Yes is fiddly and takes a bit of time (although some of the replies on here have made it sound like its completely impossible), but no more than a few people looking at it over a few nights or dedicated to looking at it a few days. It could be resolved within a week. You obviously don't "arbitrarily" do it; you review the stock and crew sides, arrange changeovers to the stock diagrams if needed and do it where it is best and strategically cancel some trains. It's how most other TOCs have done it.

I reiterate there is a difference between creating an emergency timetable for scratch and returning to a base set of diagrams - there is already one in place for Dec '21. I also maintain that at this point (and rarely do I think this), ad-hoc cancellations are better than barely running to Victoria (although the service has improved a littlesince the first week!)

I do wonder how East Croydon is handling with all the changing going on.

 

[Surreytraveller]

It simply isn't true because I've had to do it before. Yes is fiddly and takes a bit of time (although some of the replies on here have made it sound like its completely impossible), but no more than a few people looking at it over a few nights or dedicated to looking at it a few days. It could be resolved within a week. You obviously don't "arbitrarily" do it; you review the stock and crew sides, arrange changeovers to the stock diagrams if needed and do it where it is best and strategically cancel some trains. It's how most other TOCs have done it.

I reiterate there is a difference between creating an emergency timetable for scratch and returning to a base set of diagrams - there is already one in place for Dec '21. I also maintain that at this point (and rarely do I think this), ad-hoc cancellations are better than barely running to Victoria (although the service has improved a littlesince the first week!)

I do wonder how East Croydon is handling with all the changing going on.

Who are those 'few people'? That's the issue. Those 'few people' don't exist. Or they're busy doing their day jobs. Or off with covid or isolating

 

[Horizon22]

Who are those 'few people'? That's the issue. Those 'few people' don't exist. Or they're busy doing their day jobs. Or off with covid or isolating

Well then GTR is severe under-resourced in the train planning & service delivery department. People have not been isolated or off with covid for 4 weeks.

 

[Surreytraveller]

Well then GTR is severe under-resourced in the train planning & service delivery department. People have not been isolated or off with covid for 4 weeks.

Yes, that would appear to be the case. From what I've heard, Train Planning have washed their hands of the issue and everything is down to Control.
On top of the reduced timetable, there are still ad-hoc cancellations. Mainly on the coastal stuff

 

[Horizon22]

Yes, that would appear to be the case. From what I've heard, Train Planning have washed their hands of the issue and everything is down to Control.
On top of the reduced timetable, there are still ad-hoc cancellations. Mainly on the coastal stuff

That's pretty unsatisfactory that (if true) two departments which have to work closely together are refusing to do so properly. Senior management need to get a grip of it.

 

[Bald Rick]

It simply isn't true because I've had to do it before

If you’ve done that with GTR then hats off. Their planning and resourcing operation is an order of magnitude more complex than any other TOCs save Northern and GWR.

 

[Horizon22]

If you’ve done that with GTR then hats off. Their planning and resourcing operation is an order of magnitude more complex than any other TOCs save Northern and GWR.

It was suitably complex and it has involved emergency timetables. Granted I was only a small cog in the wider team, but they were built over 48-72 hours and able to be filtered back to a base timetable over a similar period too. Normally the weekend includes lots of weird 5Zxx moves to balance the stock and strange diagrams!

The transitions are of course bumpy and include ad-hoc cancellations.

 

[Surreytraveller]

It was suitably complex and it has involved emergency timetables. Granted I was only a small cog in the wider team, but they were built over 48-72 hours and able to be filtered back to a base timetable over a similar period too. Normally the weekend includes lots of weird 5Zxx moves to balance the stock and strange diagrams!

The transitions are of course bumpy and include ad-hoc cancellations.

At the moment, its all one big constant transition, as there is no planning until the Brighton Mainline blockade

 

[Capvermell]

Well it seems that posts made in this thread have finally had some impact with the Southern/GoVia train planners since as of next Monday 24th Jan three late evening rail buses will serve passengers arriving on services from London Victoria at 2105, 2205 and 2305 in to Epsom that then connect with a rail replacement bus leaving Epsom at 2210, 2310 and 0015 and reaching Ockley 55 minutes later and Horsham after 1 hour 15 minutes.

It looks like this is being achieved by hiring a couple of rail buses to provide these service so that people can get back home after an evening out (and in my case I will definitely be using the service on Wednesday evening and possibly on Friday too) but direct trains to Ockley are still only running out of London Bridge up until the 1725 service until Monday Feb 21st.

So finally the train planners have belatedly grudgingly recognised an obligation to provide mid and late evening train services from Dorking to Horsham but only after three weeks of not bothering to do so and a distinctly offhand and unsympathetic station supervisor at Dorking showing no interest whatsoever in providing taxis for passengers left with no way home south of Dorking after the 1725 from London Bridge arriving at Dorking at 1833. But this leaves a rather odd gap with no train service at all south of Dorking between 1833 and 2246 but with two subsequent services at 2346 and 0051 and these late evening rail buses all start at Epsom but its also possible to connect on to one of them with a shorter total journey time at Leatherhead. Total journey time from London Bridge to Ockley is however pretty long at 1 hour 40 minutes for the 2125 and 2225 services and 1 hour 55 minutes for the final 2315 service from London Brdge. Although its actually better to start at London Waterloo and take the 2339 train to Leatherhead with South West Trains and then pick up the rail bus at Leatherhead at 0036 getting to Ockley at 0110 with a journey time of only 1 hour 31 minutes versus the last regular 2325 train service from London Victoria with a normal 1 hour 13 minutes journey time but at least the 2339 from London Waterloo connecting at Leatherhead leaves London 14 minutes later than the last normal train service that runs south of Dorking to Horsham each night.

So good that Southern train planners have finally chosen to provide a way to get back later in the evening but very disappointing this is being done using slow rail bus connections rather than simply by running the trains from London Bridge to Dorking all the way through to Horsham. Also I would suggest this is a rather unnecessarily high cost option with the three hourly rail replacement buses that also delivers a very slow and uncomfortable service for passengers and it would surely have been much better and cheaper to find a way to just convert the 2255 from London Bridge to Dorking that runs on out of service to Horsham anyway in to a through passenger train all the way to Horsham. Whereas this solution delivers a significantly slower and more uncomfortable journey at a substantially higher cost in terms of provision to GoVia Thameslink. As South Western trains are still running to Dorking until the usual last train time it doesn't look like there are any actual evening works taking place on the line between Epsom and Horsham that necessitate that bus service provision.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

At the moment, its all one big constant transition, as there is no planning until the Brighton Mainline blockade

So whilst there is inconvenience to get to Victoria at least with the shuttle service its now possible and it generally runs pretty well. Can we expect the Vic services to return at the end of the Brighton Line blockade even if its the SX service?

 

[Peter Mugridge]

At this point, the current timetable being ran makes little sense and it probably would be better to run a Saturday service with morning and evening alterations and some services removed.

Remove:

Victoria to Epsom


Changes:
Victoria to Horsham via Sutton services additionally call at Hackbridge, Mitcham Junction and Mitcham Eastfields

That will overload the latter; The Dorking / Horsham services are generally very well loaded between London and Epsom, often with virtually all seats taken as far as Sutton. The Victoria to Epsom stoppers are also very well loaded.

Trying to combine the two will simply not work, I'm afraid.

 

[Surreytraveller]

So whilst there is inconvenience to get to Victoria at least with the shuttle service its now possible and it generally runs pretty well. Can we expect the Vic services to return at the end of the Brighton Line blockade even if its the SX service?

That's what I'm expecting.

 

[mister-sparky]

Almost 600 posts and most of them are about dorking to Horsham… getting really boring now

 

[MotCO]

Almost 600 posts and most of them are about dorking to Horsham… getting really boring now

And could have been simply resolved by Southern either laying on a RRB or agree to reimburse taxi fares. (Mind you, a unicycle might be an over-provision.....)