As many passengers will be all too well aware, Southeastern introduced a new timetable from Sunday 11 January.

It featured a new Sunday timetable, with four fast trains an hour from Sevenoaks to Cannon Street, and four trains back.

However Southeastern have failed to deliver to their own timetable for all of its first three Sundays.

On the first Sunday, 11 January, Sevenoaks passengers were offered just one fast train an hour, going to Victoria. The service planning took no account of the needs of Sevenoaks and Orpington: Hastings trains were sent from Tonbridge via Redhill to London Bridge, and Ashford trains were sent via Otford (but did not stop there) and Maidstone East (where, strangely, they did, doubling the Sunday services to Maidstone). Apparently Network Rail had planned two separate sets of engineering work affecting Ashford trains, in a typical case of a lack of joined-up thinking within the same Kent lines team.

On the second Sunday, 18 January, Sevenoaks passengers were offered two fast trains an hour, again to Victoria. Again Hastings trains were sent via Redhill to London Bridge.

Now, tomorrow, Sunday 25 January, Sevenoaks is offered four trains an hour … but they are going to Charing Cross, not Cannon Street, and not at the times in the published timetable.

Passengers on other lines have suffered similarly, and with Cannon Street closed Greenwich line customers will not have direct services to London at all.

Despite £6.5 billion and years of planning this is another example of a failure by Southeastern and Network Rail to think through the effects of the work on their customers. In our initial comments on the draft timetable we specifically said:

There is clearly going to be a lot of “engineering work”, especially on Sundays.  We would like to see a standard alternative service, maintaining a 15 minute interval, rather than ad hoc arrangements different every weekend.

A timetable is supposed to be “a list or table of events arranged according to the time when they take place“. On the evidence of three out of three Sundays, Southeastern’s effort is not a timetable at all.

PS: Spare a thought for those trying to travel from Dunton Green. They do not have any trains tomorrow; their best option seems to be to take a Rail Replacement Bus to Sevenoaks, and try their luck from there.

PPS: The National Rail Enquiries website at least quotes a correct fare for travelling from Sevenoaks to London Bridge tomorrow – which is better than it was. However it tells customer that they can get from Waterloo East to London Bridge by “TRANSFER” – without any details of what TFL services are – and are not – allowed.