I am a little disturbed by the behaviour of Southern Railway. To be fair to them I think Southern is a well run franchise and we are fortunate locally to have such new trains. It would be better if they were more frequent, but that is down to Government and to Network Rail not the local operator.
However they have a nasty habit of telling lies when they have to run 'short trains' out of London Bridge to East Grinstead or Uckfield in the evening rush hour. Every so often when there is a problem with rolling stock (the fact they have no spare stock is also poor) they have to run six, four or even two carriage trains rather than eight. On those occasions the guards have started to repeatedly announce while boarding is taking place that the train will not stop at East Croydon, only as soon as the train has departed to reinstate the stop.
Clearly what they are doing is trying to encourage those who require East Croydon to use another train, of which admittedly there is plenty of choice to free up space for those off to Oxted and beyond. I can see that they think they are doing it for the best of reasons. But even so for a company to deliberately set out to deceive on this minor of matters does not instill confidence that they would tell the truth about more major ones.
