Govia Thameslink Railway has today told passengers to plan ahead for the biggest timetable shakeup in the UK rail history in a months time.
As the UK's largest rail franchise, Govia Thameslink Railway has published the new details of train services that will affect almost a million rail journeys a day.
Govia Thameslink Railway, or GTR, runs up to 3,200 trains a day, equal to one every 27 seconds, and the times of all of these will change in the new improved timetable.
The new timetable will be in operation from 2 am on Sunday 20th May 2018 across the GTR network from Cambridge and Peterborough to Brighton and Southampton.
There will be space for 40,000 more passengers into London at peak times, a weekly capacity boost equivalent of the population of Bristol.
Major upgrades have been introduced as the GTR network, which consists of Thameslink, Great Northern, Southern and Gatwick Express, is the UK's most congested railway with passenger numbers doubling in 12 years.
Passengers will benefit from more frequent services and, by 2019, 80 more stations will have direct services to Central London stations such as Blackfriars, Farringdon and City Thameslink.
Expansion of the service a step forward in the Government sponsored £7bn Thameslink Programme. This is the upgrade project that includes the recently completed £1bn upgrade of London Bridge by Network Rail.
Over more than 10 years, platforms have been extended, rebuilt, power supplies boosted for longer trains. Signalling has been upgraded and track reworked. Now, GTR is supplying high-frequency trains in Central London in Self Drive mode. GTR has also undertaken the UK's biggest driver recruitment and training campaign.
What did the officials say?
Charles Horton, GTR Chief Executive, said:
“A huge number of passengers will notice the benefits in terms of new journeys, better intervals between trains, improved reliability, and more capacity across a wide region.
“We are redeploying trains and crew and there may be some disruption, so we ask passengers for their understanding during the transition period of several weeks during which time a very small number of trains will not run.
“Almost a quarter of all rail journeys are taken on the GTR network and because of the necessary scale of the change we strongly urge passengers to check ahead as to how their journeys will be affected.
“Introduction of the new timetables is a major milestone in the delivery of RailPlan 20/20, our programme to modernise rail services, taking advantage of the new infrastructure and trains provided by the Thameslink Programme.
“These changes followed the biggest and most effective consultation of its kind during which we made hundreds of amendments, some substantial, in response to 28,000 responses.”
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Thameslink will still expand to other places across the Southeast. Including Thameslink could/might extend to Canterbury, Maidstone, Ashford International, Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Horsham, Eastbourne, Arundel, Littlehampton, Bognor Regis, Hove, Shoreham, Worthing, Lewis and possibly extend from Cambridge to Cambridge North and King’s Lynn and from Bedford to Kettering and Corby (once the electrification is completed) except the electrification on the Midland Main Line will not extend to Nottingham and Derby. And new Bi-Mode trains will be built to replace the Class 43 HST’s on East Midlands Trains in the future.