From what I could gather and it might have been a late stock change, the Portsmouth Harbour train made up the delayed train.
At West London Junction it was 29 minutes late and it eventually got into platform 10 at Waterloo 50 minutes late! [
http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/train/W33793/2014/01/31/advanced]. The Basingstoke train finally reached Surbiton at 19.23. Only a 42 minute delay then! [
http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/train/W34536/2014/01/31/advanced]
Shame they couldn't have terminated it at Clapham Junction and run it back down from there but perhaps they didn't have the required staff there. Before anyone says Clapham is really busy, trains have been known to terminate at Clapham Junction before and during the peak too. I guess it would have to be very bad for that to happen. Some of the trains this evening were only leaving London Waterloo with a few minutes delay so I'm not sure how they got into London without such a delay compared to the Portsmouth train.
On top of that the traffic in Surbiton and Kingston tonight was terrible. Since I've been regularly travelling there I've never seen anything quite like it. On my 18-20 minute run/walk to the station I passed 5 buses. Once near the station I spent 5 minutes in Waitrose. When I came out I saw the first two buses I'd passed only now arriving towards the bus stop closest to the station.
As it is, I needn't have run and I wouldn't have done, had the station departure boards been available online. Those didn't list the 18.40 so it would have alerted me to the fact the train might not be running. Where as online it just said delayed. I couldn't be certain that it hadn't been cancelled.
The 17.02 to London Waterloo was also delayed. Later on I saw in real train times that it can be cancelled. Even now it's still showing as delayed on the national rail enquiries app. As one South West Trains guard once told me: Don't bother with the information online. I see the 19.11 to Waterloo is also delayed still. They did at least eventually cancel the 18.48 stopping service to Basingstoke. At one stage that was showing in real train times has still running. That being around 8pm! I guess they eventually had to give up on trying to get the crew and/or rolling stock for it.
Incidentally whilst on the train I did catch, the 6 minute late running 19.06 direct to Guildford, which left before the 18.57 to Guildford, I could really feel the wind at one point. Felt as if it was moving the carriages. Is that possible or would that just have been our speed? I'm surprised that they didn't run either of these trains fast to Guildford to try and make up some train. When we passed through Horsley, I saw that the other platform appeared to have a 50 minute wait until the next train. Whether that really was the case or an error, I don't know. However my train was fairly empty so they could easily have put passengers onto the train behind it. I guess it had spare time at Guildford so running it fast wouldn't have helped but it would have helped the 18.57, expect that was stuck behind our train and no chance of overtaking, unless they delayed our train which would block a platform at Surbiton! Not easy.
I find real time trains to be really good and once the app on Android includes the detailed search, it will be fantastic. Being able to save detailed searches as favourites will be great.
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On a related note, the other week on a Monday morning there were delays into London due to icy rail conditions between Havant and Guildford.
A train or two had failed around Liss. Apparently they had deiced the routes but the routes had then re-iced. How do train companies deal with such things?
On Twitter a member of SWT staff said to try and avoid the problem they would be deicing more routes the following night. However I couldn't see the logic in that. If a route is going to re-ice after being deiced, how is deicing another route going to help?
It was also on that day, that a member of staff said that they couldn't put in the maximum delay when saying how long delays might be because most passengers wouldn't be delayed by that amount. To me that seemed wrong policy to follow. This stemmed from a passenger tweeting they had been delayed by over 2 hours and the warnings said delays were up to 60 minutes. I would not personally understand that up to 60 minutes meant that was the average delay. I would take it to mean the maximum delay.
Anyway delays are still occurring tonight, although it's not as bad. Therefore they didn't hit their 21.00 target of services being back to normal. In fact every target they have tried to hit today has been missed I'm not blaming them for this, just the way things have gone for them.
- now a landslip near Botley with all services diverted via Netley with delays and an estimate for reopening early 4 Feb