Cllr. Karen George meets SW Trains

Cllr. Karen George has been having meetings with Southwest Trains and Network Rail which have proved informative.  They have a new Performance Improvement Team implementing various initiatives to benefit commuters such as the Carriage Lengthening Programme, which will see peak hour trains which are currently eight carriages long increased to ten.  They have commenced the necessary platform lengthening at Hampton Court and Guildford and the additional carriages will be added from May 2014 onwards.  The new Head of Performance, Joel Mitchell, is addressing reliability issues and praised the government for providing additional investment.  Waterloo is the busiest station in the country with passenger footfall at 94 million, an increase of one-third since 2004.  Southwest Trains experience about 100 delays per month compared to Northern Rail which has 1000 per month.  They readily admit however that the service this year has fallen below standard and are working hard to address this problem.