As many residents will be only too aware it has been a dreadful week on the railways. I attach below a statement provided in response to my request.
It is deeply disappointing that notwithstanding heavy investment we continue to have infrastructure problems. It is more frustrating that delays have also resulted from the unavailability of drivers.
This has been raised on numerous occasions. The Operators are recruiting and training more drivers but it's time we saw the outcome of these efforts in fewer cancelled and delayed journeys.
Included at bottom of the statement is information on how to secure refunds - though I know this in itself is a far from easy task for insufficient benefit.
I have raised the recent performance with the Rail Minister. Claire Perry who is in very regular dialogue with the Train Operators and Network Rail about "our" lines. We had been seeing regular recent improvements and I am very sorry that this has turned around in the very week people are keen to get home to be with family and friends. I am seeking a meeting with the Minister to review the train lines performance through the holiday period.
Regular commuters and others planning to travel over the Christmas period itself should please check before travelling as planned engineering works in our area are particular significant this year and will lead to delayed journey times.
"Performance on the Southern route this week has been particularly challenging and disruptive for passengers. There have been a series of incidents which affected each day.
The infrastructure has suffered from numerous problems including signalling failures at Norwood, Bognor and London Bridge; a power supply failure at Littlehaven and a major signalling failure at Purley. These events went on for extended periods of time and meant that the service took some time to recover, particularly the incident at Purley on Wednesday.
We have also had some unusually disruptive fleet failures which affected the service this week including a train at Coulsdon with door problems and a Horsham bound service with power issues. Yesterday (Thursday) we had a broken down train at Clapham Junction, as well as a fatality on the Tonbridge line and a trespass incident at Streatham.
There have also been some issues this week with temporary shortages of available crew with the start of the holiday season. We are, however, running the UK’s biggest driver recruitment and training programme to increase the number of drivers in the longer term.
On passenger information, our control team has been working hard this week with very fast moving, changing events across our network. The aim was to provide the latest information as soon as possible but inevitably this takes some time to filter through to all information channels. We are working on modernising and improving how we provide real time information to passengers as we know this is a particular issue for our customers.
Against a background of an already very busy network, with little margin for delay under normal circumstances whilst London Bridge station is being rebuilt, these issues made for some frustrating and long journeys this week, and we apologise to our passengers for this.
For journeys delayed by over 30 minutes, compensation is available under Delay Repay - www.southernrailway.com/delayrepay."