There is a special “Meet the Manager” event at Sevenoaks station between 1630 and 1830 on Monday 27 October. This event is intended to focus on passengers’ concerns about the London Bridge rebuilding programme and the changes to rail services from 22 December.

On the London Bridge rebuilding people will have lots of questions.  Seen from here, the main ones are:

• how are Southeastern going to manage over-crowding on trains, particularly in the morning when there are long gaps in services to London Bridge/Cannon Street?  What will happen if trains are “full and standing” before they arrive at Sevenoaks? Will compensation be paid for delays if the trains run but it is physically impossible to get onto them?
• why have the draft timetables published on 1 July been withdrawn from the Southeastern website?  How can people start planning without them?
• what is going to be done to improve passenger information, particularly during times of disruption when Southeastern have previously shown themselves least able to give up-to-date and accurate information, especially through the website and the computerised displays?  There’s a promise to equip staff with computerised tablets, but we hear that these will not be fully deployed until the end of July 2015 – after six months of the new timetable including the whole winter period when disruption is at its worst.
• what is being done to minimise the chance and the impact of overrunning engineering works?  Network Rail made some general promises, in a letter which was mysteriously withdrawn for a while.
• will passengers be able to use their rail tickets on tubes and buses between the London terminal stations – so that passengers can get on any train to any London station and then get to their original destination on the tube?  The promised announcement on this by the middle of October did not happen and we understand that no agreement has yet been reached.
• what will be done to compensate passengers – especially season ticket holders – for the day by day misery of disrupted, overcrowded, trains?  “Delay-repay” only applies if there is more than 30 minutes delay, and season ticket holders get less compensation than day ticket holders.  We’ve demanded at least a fare freeze to recognise that people are not going to get the service that they have paid for.
• the Finance Director of the Go-Ahead Group, the parent company, told investors last week that the new £3.1bn Southeastern Direct Award Contract “held [Southeastern] harmless for London Bridge disruption”.  Go-Ahead have not responded to our request of further details of this, but it may mean that Southeastern will not suffer any financial penalty no matter how bad the service is.  If so, what is the incentive for Southeastern even to try to maintain a service?
• what’s the target for service performance during the London Bridge rebuilding period? Peformance is already lowest since the snows in late 2010, and the main work on the Southeastern side, which will inevitably cause more disruption, has not even started yet.

If you do get the chance to ask questions please use the comment box below to tell us what the reply was – whether it was informative or not!