[title]
East Croydon has been officially named the ‘worst train station in London’ after data showed it has the most train delays in the capital. Over half of its services were delayed this year, also making it the seventh worst station in the country. Oh dear.
Out of those delays, 25 percent of them were considered lengthy, leaving Londoners waiting on platforms for three minutes or longer. London stations Gatwick, Blackfriars and St Albans City were also on the list for the most cancellations, all of which are on the same Thameslink line from Bedford to Brighton.
In 2019 Network Rail bought land around East Croydon station in order to build more platforms to help the station to run more smoothly, but Covid caused the plans to go awry. Thanks to the post-Covid decline, funding for the project is now uncertain.
It's not just Londoners that are suffering from late and cancelled trains. Research by the Guardian revealed a 'broken' railway system across the country, which is mainly down to mass privatisation and labour shortages made worse by the pandemic. The analysis found that more than half of the trains from the UK's 15 busiest stations were delayed or disrupted this year.
Tom Haines-Doran, author of 'Derailed: How to Fix Britain’s Broken Railways', told the Guardian: 'In all senses of the word, the railways aren’t functioning, they are dysfunctional in every important respect. And that means that to fix them isn’t just a simple task of fixing one or two aspects. The whole system has broken down and it’s going take a lot of effort and a lot of money to fix it.'
London train strikes in January: everything you need to know