The long-running labour dispute at Southern Railway has been in the news for months, but for DAVID JUKES the effect has been personal. Frustration with his disrupted commute between Portsmouth and Chichester led him to evaluate the bus alternative — and it delivers the reliability he demands.
I live in Portsmouth, so a change of employment at the end of August should have simplified my journey to work, as the new job is in Chichester and I no longer need to commute to and across London.
I could travel instead on the Southern Railway train service linking Cosham and Chichester stations, so the door-to-door journey, on paper, takes around 45min including walking at both ends. But no one commutes on paper.
A staff insufficiency saw Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR — the Go-Ahead/Keolis joint venture that operates Southern, Great Northern and Thameslink) run an emergency timetable between 8 July and 31 October, part of which cancelled all weekday Southampton-Brighton services. That halved the number of trains per hour available to me; just the hourly Southampton-London Victoria services via Cosham and Chichester remained. Restoration of full services in November made little difference, as cancellations and d…
