Southern Railway has fallen to the bottom of the rail network’s passenger satisfaction table, even though polling was carried out before its latest spate of delays, cancellations and industrial action.
The National Passenger Railway Survey (NPRS) shows Southern customer satisfaction down by eight percentage points from last autumn to 69%, the joint lowest score with Southeastern.
The polling was carried out in February and March but since then Southern has experienced even more problems, with up to 90 trains a day cancelled.
On Thursday morning, when the report by the rail watchdog, Transport Focus, was published, Southern’s website was showing “minor disruption” on all routes “due to limited train crew availability”.
Last week, a 24-hour walkout by RMT members led Southern to cancel 40% of services, with no trains at all running on 10 routes.
As well as overall satisfaction falling, the percentage of Southern customers satisfied with how the company dealt with delays dropped by five points, to 25%, the lowest across the network.
The proportion of Southern passengers who said there was sufficient room on the train and that they were satisfied with their station also fell to 57% and 69% respectively. The latter was again the worst on the network.
Anthony Smith, the chief executive of Transport Focus, said: “Many passengers are feeling the strain. As passenger numbers rise and welcome investment is put in place some passengers are having a difficult time with delays and cancellations making journeys stressful. Simply getting on a train has become a struggle for some.
“Passengers’ main need is for a reliable railway. Our latest NPRS results, in London and the south-east in particular, clearly show that for many this is not happening right now. Passengers want their reliable railway back.”
There were positive results as well, with Great Western Railway and Virgin Trains achieving a higher overall score this year.
Alex Foulds, the passenger services director of Southern, said: “We are disappointed but not surprised with these results. The survey was carried out after a prolonged period of poor performance due to the constraints of London Bridge. The effects of a new timetable introduced in December to improve performance were then lost amidst a series of infrastructure failures which severely affected punctuality and reliability during the survey period. These, coupled with the after-effects of Storm Imogen and two train failures in key locations, made for a pretty miserable time for passengers.
“Once through this challenging period we did start to see performance begin to improve, although this has now been overtaken by the recent industrial action.”
