A Wallington commuter who recorded his every journey on Southern Rail trains for almost a year claims fewer than half of his journeys were on time - with frequent delays and cancellations.

Anthony Palmer said under half (44.73 percent) his trains were on time from January 3 to December 30 last year - and the remainder were either delayed, cancelled or otherwise disrupted.

He claims this totalled to more than 16 hours’ worth of delays during commutes at an average of four minutes, mostly short trips to and from Wallington, Sutton and Carshalton Beeches stations.

Mr Palmer said: “I’ve been having problems with the trains, which have been progressively getting worse, for about the last three or four years. So I was just interested to know actually how bad, good, or indifferent the service was.

“In January I knew there was going to be a lot of action on the trains, a lot of disruption, so I just decided do it for January. Last January was really bad and then I just decided to it for the rest of the year.

“It was a bit of an ache doing, particularly finally putting it together and proofreading it to make sure everything was right, but I’m glad I’ve done it.

“I’ve got 16 hours of delays of the course of the year, which is shocking really.”

March was the best month for trains with Mr Palmer claiming just under 56 per cent arrived on schedule, followed by April (57.4), May (56.93) consecutively.

Cancellations were the second-largest cause of disruption, Mr Palmer said, at 4.73 percent followed reduced services (3.82) and engineering works (3.27).

Although he is not compiling statistics for this year, Mr Palmer hopes transport chiefs will see the data and that it will potentially highlight issues on the rail.

He added: “I don’t think it’s just Southern, people up and down the country will see these stats and think, ‘Yeah that’s happening to me too.’

“I like using the train services it just needs to be a bit more reliable.”

After verifying some of the data through the most frequent service used, a spokesman for GTR - which runs Southern - said: "Mr Palmer’s trains have been four minutes late on average because the rail network south of London, and around Croydon in particular, is the most congested in the UK.

“All his services travel through Windmill Junction near Croydon which has more trains passing over it than anywhere else in the UK. One of the platforms at East Croydon handles more trains a day than all the Inter City operators between London and the north put together. And there are more and more people getting on and off - passenger numbers have doubled in just 12 years.

"Delays to other services therefore hold up Mr Palmer’s trains, the majority of which are caused by incidents beyond our control, the most disruptive in the past two months being power, signal and track faults, and people on the line.

“To address the congestion, we’re modernising the service with a completely new timetable in May to make routes self-contained and easier to operate. This will reduce the domino effect in times of disruption and result in a more reliable service."

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