Passengers unhappy over delays to trains (From Andover Advertiser)

South West Trains passengers unhappy over delays

10:13am Friday 27th January 2012 in Hampshire Business By Jon Reeve, Education Reporter

Passengers unhappy over delays to trains

ABOUT one in eight trains on the main Hampshire to London lines ran late in the last month, while customer satisfaction with South West Trains has dropped over 12 months, new figures have revealed.

The firm has now drawn up a ten-point plan with Network Rail in a bid to improve punctuality and win over passengers.

SWT said just 86.8 per cent of its trains were on time within the four weeks to January 7, compared to an annual punctuality rate of 92.5 per cent.

Campaign group Passenger Focus singled out the company, along with Chiltern Railways, as having significant drops in satisfaction over delays in its annual survey, which nationally revealed people are increasingly unhappy with the value for money of train travel.

The operator, which carries more than 200 million passengers a year, said fatalities on the line more than doubled last year, while delays caused by cable theft were almost six times higher than the previous 12 months.

Its satisfaction rate of 84 per cent in the National Passenger Survey, for which Passenger Focus questioned 30,590 rail travellers in the autumn, is down three percentage points on last year, taking it to level with the national average.

SWT saw the second-largest year-on-year drop in overall customer satisfaction rates of all operators, and it revealed its new action plan yesterday.

The firm has vowed to carry out more proactive track and signal maintenance before problems arise, develop faster recovery after fatalities and cable thefts, and provide better customer information, including alternative route plans for passengers facing disruption.

It is also promising to better prioritise infrastructure work, improve the reporting of faults, train more volunteer managers to help out when needed and make investments at London Waterloo to cut disruption.

Network Rail’s route managing director for Wessex, Richard O’Brien, said: “In recent months South West Trains passengers have not had the high levels of service and punctuality they have been used to, for which we apologise.

“The new plan we have developed with South West Trains will make it easier for our engineers to access the railway to try to prevent infrastructure failures before they cause delays and help us respond better to incidents, both those in and those out of our control, such as fatalities and cable thefts.”