Well as old school all I can see is no real marked improvements at all from when I first started.
Waterloo - Guildford via either WK or C was 50' and last call Wimbledon.
Waterloo - Dorking was 40' and Chessington 30' dead.
It'll be interesting to see what they come up with for the so called mainline "fast" services.
They need serious improvements on:
Waterloo - Portsmouth via Guildford as it used to be about 80', with calls at Guildford, Haslemere, Havant, Southsea & Harbour, I managed to do one in just 66' Guildford - Havant, Southsea & Harbour.
They really should worry about the times there because the Hindhead tunnel gives you a car journey time of about 40' from Guildford to Portsmouth.
Waterloo - Bournemouth & Weymouth need to be reduced back to where they were in the 80's again to be competitive. As does the WoE line.
Surely they can't do that with removing stops.... Like that's going to happen.
It would be nice to have faster services heading south in the morning, rather than just the all stations stoppers. Again in the evening it would be nice to have faster services. There's a period where from Portsmouth you just get all station stoppers before the fasts resume once more.
May be the evening service could be every 30 minutes from places like Godalming like it is on the Alton line. Of course the latter may be overkill vers passenger numbers so I'd conceed that one.
One I'd less wish to conceed though is the lack of services from Surbiton to Alton. After the 16.41 there isn't another until 20.11. Then it's every half an hour again. Basingstoke gets one semi fast services at 17.00, a fast at 17.39 and 18.40 and then nothing until 20.00 and then it magically becomes half an hour gaps again. Do more people really want to travel after 20.00 or is it just infrastructure issues?
In the morning there is one at 5.42 and the next one isn't until 8.44, although the 8.14, with a change at Brookwood isn't much slower. The rest in between though are 20 minutes slower.
Basingstoke fares better again in the morning than Basinw and although there might not be direct services one can get fast services from Basingstoke to Woking, which partly offset the additional time spent on the stoppers from Woking to Surbiton.
Of course Woking passengers would really love services that stopped at Clapham Junction in the morning. I know someone who works in Kew and they leave on the last train to stop at Clapham Junction. Miss that and they have to get additional ticket to get to Waterloo and back out again to Clapham Junction or get a stopper to Surbiton and another to Clapham Junction. I also assume if it's cancelled they do similar but in that case it might be that they would be allowed in and out, given its not their fault the service was cancelled.
Of course a lot of what I talk about requires infrastructure changes. If you don't get that then nothing much can be done. So I'd be surprised if much of the above happened for that reason.
One day though it will.
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Could SWT, test the market for a late Portsmouth service by splitting the Southampton service at Eastleigh. As that would at least minimise the costs and amount of track that they have to keep open.
Obviously it wouldn't bring all the benefits of the more direct service, but people would rather use a service that takes hours than wait until the morning, especially when it's cold and/wet.
The issue is that people living in Guildford, Haslemere and Petersfield would miss out. They don't on a Sunday might.
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