Kingston Area Travellers' Association

Managers from beleaguered rail company First Capital Connect are to host a question and answers session with commuters. FCC managing director Neal Lawson, as well as other directors and managers, will be at Tulse Hill station between 7.30am and 9.30am next Tuesday to talk to customers about the recent service issues and what the company is doing to ensure improvements are made.

Click on the link above to read the latest issue of Katalog.

The London Assembly Transport Committee’s response to the Mayor’s draft strategy highlights concerns that overcrowding, congestion and carbon emissions will not be tackled effectively without further intervention from the Mayor.

In the reality of restricted resources – particularly funding and road space – and a growing population, the Strategy should set out the Mayor’s thinking in relation to the difficult decisions he and his successors will face.

These decisions include setting future fare levels; the relative priority of the stalled step-free access programme compared to schemes to provide additional capacity; balancing the flow of vehicles against the movement and safety of buses and pedestrians; and the potential for financial incentivisation schemes to encourage people to change the way they travel.

Two pickpockets who preyed on pensioners, including a 91-year-old, in bus queues in and around Kingston, have received three year prison sentences. Both Perry Mahoney, 48, from Stockwell, and David Turner, 50, from Lambeth, were sentenced to three years and four months.

South West Trains (SWT) has pledged to improve its communications with passengers, after a number of incidents during last week’s snow storms left people confused and without information. For example, passengers at Worcester Park station were waiting for up to an hour-and-a-half for a train to Waterloo on Wednesday evening, even though the departure boards indicated that trains were running on time.

Is the much-maligned Dial-a-Ride service actually getting any better?  And will integrating door-to-door services lead to improvements for the half a million Londoners with mobility impairments?

A new investigation by the London Assembly Transport Committee will look at what progress has been made on addressing more immediate service problems, as well as assessing proposals to create a more coordinated, borough-led door-to-door transport service.

A train caught fire just outside Berrylands station on Thursday morning causing travel chaos to trains heading into London Waterloo. Around 200 passengers waited on the smoking train for about an hour and a half before being evacuated along the snow-covered tracks to Berrylands. Firefighters said the fire was caused by an electrical fault.