I'm afraid, if I'm perfectly honest, that my experiences over the last couple of months have shown a deterioration in resilience for various reasons, some of which I am sure, others less so. I would not agree that I have found the timetable to be resilient to minor delays. I think commuters and especially less regular passengers are starting to become a little more confident in using London Bridge vice current Thameslink Core stations or Victoria, and as a result I have found more delays in and out of the platforms due to poor walking speeds and overcrowding, as well as the continuing major inability by the planners to see that minimum turnarounds in the heart of the morning peak are simply not as efficient as they are on paper. There are plenty of services, especially those via Oxted, Haywards Heath and Redhill, which seem to be accumulating sizeable delays on Southbound journeys in the morning due to turnaround times remaining unsustainable. It is not so much about crew resources or anything like that; it is simply a case of making sure you can change ends and get all the passengers on and off. Woe betide anybody needing to use a wheelchair ramp, or anybody who wants a clean train on departure, or the PIS set up if calling patterns have been altered. The most you can do is safe dispatch, and that is a major challenge. I've had to stop dispatch a number of times, fortunately not with trains in motion but during the process, due to a dangerous environment caused by overcrowding or people obstructing doors; my colleagues likewise, and it will carry on. There are other, simple things too: the station announcements are too loud, so you can't communicate verbally about the service, which can delay the start of dispatch. It's been reported per the usual processes - but because the only consequence so far, at least in recent months, seems to have been lost time affecting different random services each day, I've not seen any effort to deal with these issues.
The delays are causing an impact on the real world - the presence of the Southbound morning peak flow from London Bridge may be much smaller than the more natural Northbound flow, but it is very important and drives a lot of crucial sectors, including a very specific demographic of the construction industry in the Croydon area. As a result, a lot of workers building and maintaining infrastructure in South London are being significantly delayed on a regular basis due to the inability to allow enough time for passengers to board and alight. It really is as simple as that, and it will start to have a noticeable impact on the economy if it is not sorted. Other peak flows from London Bridge on the Southern network include a number of commuters heading down from Essex towards South London who are becoming increasingly frustrated with the service, particularly as any diversion for them will cause quite a lot of inconvenience. In addition I am finding more and more of the "second" Northbound peak journeys on routes such as the Uckfield line will now be turning round late at the country end, and so delays on turnaround at London Bridge will then cause a second late turnaround... the list goes on! This has all swelled up again in recent weeks and it's somehow ended up being more of a bottleneck.
