The Sevenoaks Rail Travellers Association has responded to Southeastern’s proposals for the timetable for the second phase of the London Bridge rebuilding; from August 2016 trains to Charing Cross and Waterloo East will be able to stop at London Bridge once more, but those to Cannon Street will then not be able to stop at London Bridge until 2018.

For Sevenoaks overall the proposed timetable is more like the “normal” timetable before January 2015 – off-peak during the day and in the evenings all the fast trains go to London Bridge, Waterloo East and Charing Cross, and peak morning trains such as the 0723 are no longer diverted from the normal pattern. The SRTA broadly welcomes the return to the service patterns of the pre London Bridge rebuilding timetable. In particular the off-peak and evening pattern restores the frequent services to and from Charing Cross and eliminates the long gaps introduced in January 2015; this gives back to shoppers, day trippers and theatre-goers the turn-up-and-go services they need.

However because Cannon Street trains will not stop at London Bridge there will be no way for passengers to get from Sevenoaks to Cannon Street off-peak by changing at London Bridge. Unfortunately, in a lack of joined-up thinking, Southeastern have not worked out arrangements for ticket acceptance on TfL from August 2016. The impact of the proposals on travellers can only be properly judged when arrangements to overcome the absence of opportunities to change at London Bridge to reach the City are known. We presume tickets will continue to be accepted between Charing Cross and Cannon Street (via Embankment). However, in view of the length of the diversion via Charing Cross of nearly 30 minutes we have urged Southeastern to negotiate acceptance of tickets on the Northern line between London Bridge and Bank and possibly the Waterloo & City line from Waterloo to Bank. We understand there may be capacity issues with these options in the peak, but we cannot see why there should not at least be such an arrangement in the off peak periods when there is spare capacity.

There is also a large gap in services from the Kent mainline into Cannon Street in the AM peak.  In the proposals, between 0644 and 0801, there is currently just one fast arrival from Sevenoaks into Cannon Street at 0730. Given the loadings on the Cannon Street services from Sevenoaks prior to the rebuilding this train is likely to be extremely heavily loaded. Consequently we are very surprised to see a planned stop at Orpington, lengthening the journey time and especially since Orpington has a regular 20 minute service into Cannon Street scheduled to take just only 5 minutes longer.  We recommend removing the Orpington stop from this service. While we understand the limited capacity at Cannon St to accommodate the Greenwich line services we think that an additional fast service from the Kent mainline into Cannon Street could be provided by switching a slow service from Sevenoaks to Cannon Street into Charing Cross instead.

There are no changes currently proposed to the slow services from Sevenoaks or to the services on the Maidstone East line.

The details of the fast services to/from Sevenoaks are here.