Southwesttrains Reviews

Pathetic service. Trains are literally always delayed/cancelled. Often miss important events due to delays. Even the employees admit that the management is abysmal. Simply waiting for Chris Grayling to finish his investigation and strip it of its franchise LNER-style.

Utter disgrace of an operation , delays , cancellations , broken down trains. Changing itineraries of trains last minute to avoid stops I.e. trains to Waterloo via Woking and Clapham junction . Shambolic..
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When with DFT step in and strip this franchise. SWR just cannot cope with anything. I now long for the days of SWT who werent brilliant but at least seemed to professionally mange issues and delays faster and more responsibly. After 25 years commuting I am at the point of changing jobs. I just cant be reliable going to work. My wife is fed up of my excuses for being late home, missing kids events. Shocking. Abysmal. Appaling. A discrace for a service. I have so many claims in the delay repay. And thats missing out the ones I cant claim because they are just under 15 mins. I wish I could aggregate these as they accumulate to 20-25 mins per day and I cant claim! A shambles.

I'm standing on the platform waiting as train after train is cancelled.
Apparently a leaf blew in the line ten hours ago fifteen miles away.
This railway company is a complete joke.
They keep putting the fares up above inflation but the services just go from worse to unacceptable.
How can such an important service be allowed to be so unreliable.

Never run on time always delay. Since management changed things changed completely. Once it was a quite good service. Shame!!

This is my 3rd journey since I last wrote about SWR. And still not one of them on time. I’m standing on Yeovil station with a 20 minute delay indicated. No announcement; no apology. The station staff have all legged it due to “operational reasons” and so just us passengers to comfort each other. And now a 3.1% increase to cheer up the SWR team whilst we passengers wallow in our misery

Consistently bad since swr took over the franchise

The change in Franchise from SWT to SWR has left customers with a service that appalling. Delays, train cancellations, cancelled stops at short notice are the norm. This can’t go on – the Department for Transport must step in to sort out this mess. SWR should get zero stars.

If Waterloo was not so far away from reading I would never use there trains counceld NO train at all why we have to pay out so much pay a hole week only what 5 days the service is sh^t there is not a strong anuff word to say how sh^t
there service is and we all have to suffer and this is meant to take cars of the road only because London is so stupid to drive to park as no one would use sh^t west trains why don’t they go back to British rail

Simply poor service. Trains often cancelled completely, usually run late and my least favourite practice - skipping stops to try and make up time. That is a major pain if you are one of those stops, because they kick you off and make you wait for the next one. Where I live in suburban London, that can be up to half an hour. Really awful. [This review relates to South Western Railways who took over the franchise from South West Trains].

32.40 a day for a return ticket and in the last two months they’ve been on time a total of 8 times. How can anyone reliably commute via train to work when it involves a southwestern railway train

Worst service ever every train is late, congestions everywhere, trains packed to the point that you can't move or breathe. If you have to travel far it's sure that you'll be late. I have to take 4 trains to get to my course one of them is south west trains and because of their service i'm always late. Bad experience bad service and awful customer service as well. Each of us gives them a lot of money and this is the service they offer, sometimes i wonder where this money goes.

This lot will have you dancing between platforms all day long. Terrible, terrible, terrible service.

I unfortunately have to take this train everyday as there are no other alternatives where I live. I have to say that I have never had a journey without disruption, delay and cancelled trains.

It is very expensive, and to be honest would rather move than deal with this everyday.

People should boycott using it all together! All they want is money, they ABSOLUTELY DON'T CARE about the customer.

I have a bad experience with SWR! delays , industrial strike , train cancelling! because of the services i’m late all the time at work! Avoid if is possible!

They r doing lot of industrial action and it's seems reducing the number of coaches is their recent attempt to save cost or unannounced industrial action. U get up in morning and stand for an hour journey to Waterloo. No explanation on why train running with reduced number of coaches.

Took a train today from Reading to Ascot, with no functioning facilities. Both washrooms' toilets were out of order and overflowing with human excrement that smelt like it had been there awhile. Its clear that management did not inspect the train before departure of depot and / or station and / or janitorial services were not performed to provide clients with a clean train service.

Shockingly bad staff. All lifts at Wimbledon station out of service, asked 3 members of staff if someone coul help me take my pram down the 2 steep flights of stairs to the platform, after staring blankly ALL of them tell me they have recently had shoulder surgery and cant help. When i asked if they could tell me who can help they told me to ask a member of the public and that they used to employ someone to do that and turned away to talk amongst eachother. I went to the ticket office to ask for help and they gave me a complaints form to fill out.
Every one of them was so rude and unhelpful, its annoying and dangerous taking a pram down those stairs and Wimbledon is specifically marked out as an acessible station! God knows how wheelchair users can get around the station with all platform lifts out of order and such terrible, lazy staff. Joke.

This is the worst rail company, no - correction just worst company I have ever experienced in my 50 years in this country - for many reasons, but not least that they threatened to take me for court, a situation which started when the machine failed after a number of attempts to give me my advanced booked tickets, through absolutely no fault of my own. There was no ticket office, so I got on the train and explained my case to the guard. He issued me with a non ticket statement, which I had to sign. I then changed at another station and tried again at a machine and this time the machine gave me my tickets. Explaining this in my appeal to the statement I had signed, with all of the relevant tickets and forms enclosed and photocopies, they decided to charge me for the ticket again anyway and on top of this an extra £35, bringing the total I had to pay to £42. This caused me a huge amount of upset, stress and frustration more than I have ever felt for any other company. If you can possibly avoid it don't use South western trains / southern owned by 'first group'. The only reason I didn't fight it was because i was going away, although maybe that prevented me from having an even worse experience. Nightmare company!

Much worse since the new franchise. Punctuality, service, information and attitude have all declined. I am a daily commuter paying above inflation increases annually and am seeing my money being wasted on repainting and reupholstering recently refurbished carriages instead of on necessary improvements in service. The forthcoming timetable changes will make my commute earlier longer and busier.

My wifi access was censored. I was looking at an article about human rights and was stopped from viewing it as they said it had content that was not allowed. When challenged they refused to give me their criteria and would not budge. I pointed out that such censorship would also effect journalists and others trying to work on the train. There was absolutely nothing in the article that incited violence and would normally attract attention. It looked like simple discrimination and racism.

Really really bad service. The website makes it seem like it’s really easy to get a refund for a ticket but in reality, they make it so inconvenient that it makes you want to not go through all the trouble for a refund. I feel as if they make it seem like you can get refunds just to shut customers up when there’s a delay or cancellation. Plus the trains are always delayed, it’s either a signalling problem or staff missing which is unacceptable because we all have somewhere we have to be on time. In addition, station staff are very uncooperative and don’t even seem to be informed about delays.

Shocking, my train to work is always either cancelled or delayed. Awful service.

This company is the absolute epitome of a company who runs a shoddy service and to top it off seemingly will try and scam you out of more cash any which way they can even when you legitimately have already purchased a ticket; this is even when you have a ticket for a specific time, want to go earlier or later, the ticket says exchangeable for a fee before travel, the ticket office says it’s not, isn’t that false advertising?.

It feels very much like South West trains will find any little tiny way of scamming you out of cash; I wouldn’t be Surproses if they have a very dedicated team in the background figuring out ways of extorting Extra cash via T&C’ nuiances, or/and I would expect the onboard ticket checkers are on bonuses for charging additional.

Am I asking to much that you are made to feel like a valued customer.

Note to self, drive in future, running such a service does not encourage use of public transport as it should.

Merry *bleeping* Xmas South West trains, what goes Around, comes around.

Train cancellation every morning peak time. Next train is regular. Something going wrong with them.