To: South Western Railway

It's the only f***ing job.

Dear South Western Railway,

Today's commute managed to be a shambles in both directions. That takes some doing.

The morning

I arrived at my station on time and boarded a full train. We then sat there for 10 minutes while a defect was inspected. Fair enough. Safety first, I get it.

What came next was a bloody farce. A fast train was due on another platform, so the entire load of our train got off and moved across. The platform became so dangerously overcrowded that your own staff had to use the tannoy to try to get people to behave safely.

A few moments later, the original train we'd all been told to abandon left anyway. Everyone then crammed onto a train now carrying twice the passengers it was meant to.

This could have been sorted with some f***ing common sense.

Either the train was fit to go or it wasn't. Pick one, tell people, and don't herd hundreds of commuters into a crush while you make your mind up.

The evening

I arrived at Waterloo 10 minutes early. Five minutes before my train home was due to leave, it was marked as delayed. Several hundred people, me included, headed for the slow service leaving shortly afterwards.

A few minutes later, the fast train turned up at its original platform and everyone sprinted back to it. It left a grand total of two minutes late.

The point

In both cases the trains themselves were barely the problem. The problem was that nobody told passengers anything accurate or timely.

How can your communication be this f***ing poor? Telling people which train is going where, and when, is quite literally the job.

It is the one thing you have to get right.

Yours, thoroughly fed up,
A South Western Railway commuter