New Trains, New Lies ?

Many of you will frequently have to travel to London from Petersfield, Liss, Liphook or even Haselmere. South West Trains (SWT), having clearly learnt a great deal from Labour's spin machine, is trying to make us believe that it is enhancing the line by making more seats available. Sadly, this is not exactly the case.

As of January 2007, SWT are taking most of the high quality White Siemens trains off our line and replacing them with blue trains. These blue trains are do technically have more seats on them but the seats are tiny (five aside rather than four aside) with hideously little legroom. These blue trains were designed for suburbia and they are now being imposed on our live, previously treated (quite correctly) as a long distance route.

This is yet another example of Labour's failure to invest enough in transport, especially in the overcrowded South East, making our quality of life appreciable worse. We need to campaign for real investment which will lead to more capacity on the line (double decker trains like the French have are my favourite) and not allow SWR and the neglectful Department for Transport to get away with arguing that switching us to uncomfortable overcrowded trains is a service improvement.