SWR timetable - carries on as at present until next March

[whole diary]

[grahame]

I wanted to write to you to provide an update on our plans regarding our timetable from 13 December 2020.

In October SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) informed our stakeholders about our plans to increase services from 13 December 2020. The decision to increase our services was made earlier this year, at a time when we were seeing a steady increase in passenger numbers.

However, since I wrote to you, the nation has entered a second lockdown and from tomorrow we will again be entering a tiered system of restrictions. As you will appreciate, these measures have had an impact on our passenger numbers both current and forecasted.

In light of this, with the permission of the Department for Transport, we have taken the decision to ?rollover? our weekday timetable from 13 December 2020 to 26 March 2021. We believe this is the right decision for our business and the taxpayer, who through the Government have been supporting the rail industry throughout this pandemic.

To summarise our timetable from 13 December 2020:

Weekdays - SWR will continue to operate the same timetable that has been running since early September 2020, subject to final approval by Network Rail and planned engineering works, particularly over the Festive Period.

Weekends ? Some weekend timetables will still change to reflect patterns in demand and to accommodate planned engineering works, so we are advising our customers to check before they travel.

I hope you will appreciate the scale of the challenge posed by the fast-moving situation presented by COVID-19 as we try to keep our passengers informed of changes in a timely manner. Please rest assured that my colleagues at SWR and Network Rail are working hard to ensure journey planning systems are up to date with the latest information.

While weekday services should be correct through to March 2021, we are working closely to ensure that planned engineering works during the festive period and weekend changes are reflected in the system. We are confident the journey planners will be fully updated by 5 December 2020, although weekend timetables will be subject to change up to 4 weeks in advance of travel.

More information on our current and future timetable can be found at: https://www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey/timetables

       

[Surrey 455]

That's a shame. I was quite happy the weekend before last when I went to the "Print your own timetable" page on the National rail site and saw that my trains were going back to a normal 30 minute frequency in mid December. Fast forward 7 days and the same page is showing an hourly frequency again. 

It's colder now so my 45 minute wait at Waterloo is accompanied by a takeaway cappuccino, in the summer I would have taken a train to Epsom or Leatherhead and sat in the sun with a paper whilst waiting for my train.

[grahame]

From SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) (and posted in another thread in full) ...

Our journey planners for next week have been updated, and PDF timetables are available on our website at: www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey/timetables.

However, further changes to timetables may need to be made at short notice, so we strongly recommend customers  check their journey closer to the time of travel at www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey.

On the Isle of Wight, the oldest of trains on the national network have been replaced for three months by what I understand are just about the most modern buses around.  Timetables below - a very rare example of the same tables for 7 days a week (with just a few services marked as running certain days only.   Come Easter, trains should return but they will NOT be as totally brand new as the buses on the run at present.