[SimonS1]

Southern Railway website says:

1. “The improvement works near Purley are ongoing and the planned hand back is still scheduled for the start of service on Thursday 2 January”.

2. “Following a landslip at Ockley, near Dorking, Network Rail has been assessing the damage and unfortunately there needs to be a significant amount of work carried out to get the track back to normal. This will not be a quick repair and we are working with Network Rail to determine what service we can provide in the meantime.”

Dorking is not on the “fast line” to London.

[openfly]

I have just used the replacement Gatwick to Victoria bus/train service via East Grinstead.

There are frequent buses from LGW to EG and the journey takes about 25mins. Southern Trains are doing a great job at EG. The buses are well organised and the trains all have 12 carriages. They depart every 15mins. The journey time to/from Victoria takes about an hour on the slowest train.

Hope that helps.

[1nfrequent]

The trains were so snarled up today that the easiest way for me to get home was to take the National Express coach to LHR (at a cost of 25 quid) and then the bus home (for a cheap £1.40). Took 2 hours in total but I think that’s about how long it would have taken to do the train TBH.

1F

[JKL]

I’ve just done Brighton – Victoria up, with replacement bus from Three Bridges to East Grinstead, and London Bridge – Brighton back, with replacement bus from Coulsdon Town to Three Bridges (there are also buses from Coulsdon Town to LGW and I think I saw that the northbound trains continue from Three Bridges to LGW also). Aside from the extra journey time (about 2h15m ish rather than an hour or so, coast to city, so I guess half that for LGW) it was all pretty seamless and stress free. Lots of staff on hand, all friendly and helpful and pointing people in the right direction. Neither of my journeys were overly busy, so it was far from the hell I’d been expecting 😉 One plus – unlike the Brighton mainline trains, the East Grinstead ones (or at least, the one I was on) have a power socket for charging iPhones/laptops etc at every pair of seats.

A lot of southbound trains were cancelled today but there seemed to still be at least two an hour from each of Victoria and London Bridge from what I could see. Oddly the online timetable was showing everything as cancelled, but once I clicked Alternatives, it showed a bunch of other services that were running and appeared to be exactly the same routes…

Hope that may be of use.

[SimonS1]

There you go then. Get past the initial rant and it wasn’t so bad after all.

[SimonS1]

The engineering works were completed on time and all lines between Gatwick and London are open.

[Author]

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