Hmm aren’t Engineering Works on the Railways annoying? I fell foul of this on Saturday when I decided to spend the day in London spending time with my family at various points in the day. However this journeys there and back where probably not as enjoyable for some the other occupants on the trains I travelled on (I got a seat both ways) as Network Rail obviously don’t think of the things we think of here when major disruptions are due to occur ..

Were a South Coast football team with lots of local support (e.g. Pompey) to play say a London football team (e.g. Spurs) on a Saturday (i.e. people can easily travel to the match) would you not expect a fair amount of additional passengers than your usual Saturday services? That’s of course why Network Rail decided to do the works around Woking way on Saturday, thus reducing our service from 4 an hour to 2 an hour and add 30mins to the journey due to a re-routing. This meant you had 2 trains compounded into 1 so it meant that you only got a seat if you were in the first half of passengers to get on at Petersfield (that’s about 25mins drive from Pompey). On the way back similarly if you got on at the London end you only had a 5 coach train (at least going up had been 8 coach) to fit 2 trains worth of passenger on so people stopped having to stand after Petersfield.

So I endured my train journeys with footie fans (music box v.useful), but from the conversation on the train back it would seem that the match wasn’t worth the hassles of the train journeys as Pompey lost 3-1 and played poorly.

Hmm I wonder if Network Rail ever look at things likely to affect passenger numbers when disrupting services… I know we try to minimise disruptions on major routes at weekends when Pompey are at Home due to the additional traffic it produces (despite the ground being next door to a train station!).