TLC recently had the opportunity to meet with the Minister of State for Rail, Chris Heaton-Harris, Southeastern’s Managing Director, David Statham, and Southeastern’s Train Services Director, Scott Brightwell. Although the main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the recent cuts to Medway Valley Line services we also had an opportunity to discuss other topics such as timetable changes and capacity planning.
Since the 22nd of February, Southeastern services at Tonbridge have been severely cut – with just 2 trains per hour running towards London during the off-peak period compared to 6 trains per hour normally. Worse still, these trains have been mostly shortened to just 4 carriages – resulting in an overall 83% drop in capacity! Although the country is still in the midst of a national lockdown, we have seen some suggestions that this severely reduced level of service is proving insufficient for maintaining a safe level of physical distancing on-board for those who still need to travel at this time.
However, as restrictions are gradually eased many of us would expect service levels to increase in order to meet the needs of people travelling again – be it for work, school or leisure. Shockingly, Southeastern have confirmed that no further changes are planned to the current timetable until May. Even then, only a “4 to 5% step up” in services across the Southeastern network can be expected until the next regular timetable change in December. The only consolation is that this only applies to the number of trains, and not their lengths – so 4 carriage services may return to 8 again. However, even when lengthened this still represents a significant drop in capacity with just 2 off-peak trains per hour. This would put capacity below that seen last summer when busy services on warm days were a reasonably common sight.
If the easing of restrictions happens as planned without a suitable increase in train frequencies and lengths, it is hard to see how the capacity situation would be any better this spring and summer – and much likely worse. We are sceptical of Southeastern’s ability to be able to quickly restore services outside the planned timetable to match increased demand. The current severely reduced timetable came in to force 7 weeks after the start of the current national lockdown – we cannot wait 7 weeks to witness overcrowding and increase capacity again. Moreover, in our meeting they expressed a desire not to keep tinkering with the timetable, and just to leave the May timetable in place until December.
The railways need to win back passengers – and trains that are overcrowded until at least December is not a method that is likely to achieve this. We hope to have a follow-up meeting with Southeastern within the next few weeks regarding capacity and the May timetable and will be making the case for a pre-planned increase in train frequencies and lengths. As it stands at the moment, the railway seems ill-prepared to meet the demand that will come with an easing of restrictions.