Southern to double the number of trains on some services in Sussex

Passengers are set to get up to 5,000 extra seats as Southern has redesigned their West Coastway timetable.

Southern Rail will increase services between Brighton and Worthing and Chichester on the West Coastway route.

The rail operator also announced there will also be more services between London and Portsmouth via Gatwick Airport.

A spokesperson for Southern has said:

"The improvements to weekday and Saturday schedules include new and more frequent services with expanded capacity on busier routes, evenly spaced departures to cut waiting times, and better reliability and punctuality.

"These improvements will encourage existing customers to make more journeys, and attract new passengers, including people currently using congested roads such as the A27/M27".

The main changes, to be introduced from Monday 3 June, are:

• The number of trains between Brighton, Worthing and Chichester will be doubling from two to four an hour
• As part of this, services between Brighton and Southampton will double in frequency from hourly to half-hourly to meet demand on this route
• There will be an extra stop at Woolston for easy connections with the local bus networks
• There will be a new hourly, all-stations Brighton to Littlehampton and Chichester. This will link Brighton and Littlehampton with an all-day service for the first time since 2007
• London to Portsmouth services via Gatwick Airport will double in frequency from hourly to half-hourly
• Departures will be more evenly spaced so customers don’t have to wait so long for a train

Jenny Saunders, Southern’s Customer Services Director, said:

“We are making these changes to give passengers more trains and many more seats on our more popular routes.

"Services will be much more frequent, more punctual, faster in some cases, and more reliable right across the network. There will be less waiting for trains as well because we’ll space out the services more evenly.

“We considered every response carefully and, to better serve our customers’ needs, we’ve made eight main amendments to our original proposals, and incorporated hundreds of smaller changes to the times of individual trains.”

The new timetable is expected to be available in online journey planners from 11 March.

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