Something of a hole was left in the MarshLink Action Group annual meeting in March when Southern Railways’ representative David Walker was let down by his own rolling stock – a flat tyre – and never made it to the meeting. He would have faced many questions about Southern’s performance over the year, so David Scorer (Southern’s deputy managing director) has now agreed to respond to issues at a public meeting at Rye Town Hall, on April 28 at 7pm. The start of the meeting may be delayed slightly to enable those coming by train not to miss the first few minutes . . .
At the original meeting, Southern’s east coastway area manager did what he could to respond to questions, but as he had been in that role only a short time found it difficult and agreed to research and respond to those he had been unable to answer. Mlag submitted the following basic issues in writing and we trust these will be responded to at the town hall meeting:
- There used to be a connections policy at Ashford, but this has now fallen into disrepute with a delay in an inbound train resulting in a missed connection. Mlag would like to see a policy reintroduced to enable late-running trains to meet their connections if the delay is within a specified number of minutes
- Following the track improvements over the past few years (starting with the closure of Ore Tunnel, many will remember), when will line improvements be used to improve line speeds, timetabling and, indeed, enable a connectivity policy to be reintroduced?
- The last westbound train currently leaves Ashford at 22.34, but Mlag would like to see a later train.
We limited our written questions to these priority issues but there were many others present whose questions remained unanswered and it is also for this reason the meeting has been arranged.
Stuart Harland is the chairman of Mlag