From Monday, 17 January, South Western Railway (SWR) will introduce a temporary timetable because of the increasing impact of the spread of the Omicron variant.
The emergence of Omicron has led to staff shortages across SWR, resulting in unavoidable short-notice cancellations. This has caused the need for a new temporary timetable, but with current guidance to work from home, this timetable should sufficiently meet current demand.
The temporary timetable ensures reliability for those who cannot work from home and rely on SWR for travel.
The temporary timetable changes will remain under review, and journey planners will be updated weekly since engineering work may also affect services. SWR will issue updates towards the end of each week.
Rigorous planning has gone into developing the new timetable so that it delivers the right level of service for the current situation. However, SWR will continue to monitor its services to ensure that they continue to deliver for its customers.
Core timetables are available through the SWR website via http://www.southwesternrailway.com
The latest timetables are available at https://www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey/timetables
Key timetable changes include:
- Waterloo to Exeter services will split at Salisbury;
- Waterloo to Weymouth services will split at Bournemouth;
- The Shepperton branch will reduce to hourly;
- Waterloo to Alton will reduce to hourly;
- Waterloo to Basingstoke will reduce to hourly;
- The last train of each day will be earlier than at present.
Commenting, SWR's Managing Director Claire Mann said: “The spread of the Omicron variant has had a significant impact on our railway, with fewer people using the train and staff shortages impacting on our ability to consistently deliver the current timetable.
“Having assessed demand and spoken to our industry colleagues, we believe this new timetable is the most effective means of ensuring our customers receive a reliable service, with short-notice cancellations minimised.
“Journey planners will be updated on a week-by-week basis, with updates taking place towards the end of each week. Customers should check their journey as close to their time of travel as possible.”
Basingstoke is actually being served more frequently than hourly (Woking, Basingstoke are call points for other routes), it is the intervening stations (e.g. Hook) that have reduced services both ways and an a much earlier finish, especially Northbound.
South Western Railway have yet to confirm on when or if they will be allowing the Class 701 Arterios to come into service that will be operated on the suburban services and to replace the Class 455, Class 456, Class 458/5 and Class 707 rolling stocks. And the rest of the Class 707s cascaded to Southeastern.