I travelled on Britain's first renationalised train (and it took four times longer than usual)

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25-05-2025

'Rail Replacement Bus': three of the most depressing words in the English language. It's 5.08am, and rain is lashing at the prison-high walls of Woking station, a key commuter stop in the depths of Surrey, the steel shutters covering the entrance rattling but refusing to budge.
It looks like a gloomy start for Britain's first nationalised rail service for 30 years. But then the sun comes out, the shutters lift and the train waiting on platform three is ready to leave. It's just deeply unfortunate for the Labour government that, on what should have been a rather momentous day in Labour's brave new world of rail renationalisation, over half of my journey to London is going to be replaced by a bus.
Still, this hasn't thwarted the half a dozen hardy souls about to pile on board the 5.36am to Waterloo. For Rob Potter and his former colleague Steve, it's an excuse to crack open the Laphroaig single malt. 'Trains,' he says grandly, 'are the finest form of transport in the world.'
Sadly, not many of the people he dealt with when he worked for South Western Railway as their customer services manager would have agreed.
Users of Tripadvisor, the travel website, have given the service so many one-star reviews it's hard to find anything positive about it. (Another passenger tells me about the time he saw another South Western Railway manager – not 60-year-old Potter, mercifully – sharing a box of Celebrations with passengers one Christmas, before being angrily mobbed for his troubles, such was the level of general discontent.)
In fact, customer dissatisfaction is a major reason South Western Railway was replaced with a Government-run body when the franchise ran out at 1.59am on Sunday morning.
Eventually, all the privatised rail companies will come back under government control. 'It's one promise Keir Starmer is keeping and should get credit for,' says Potter.
But fellow passenger Guy Holmes, a member of Warwickshire County Cricket Club, is less optimistic. He's in a rush to get to the ground for his team's derby match against local rivals Worcestershire. His connection to Euston is crucial but complex. 'There are several permutations of the journey and other engineering work to contend with,' he tells me anxiously.
Matthew Tam, a 27-year-old experimental physicist at University College London, is cut from a different cloth, however. He was first in the queue to board the train at Woking and is one of a smattering of train enthusiasts braving the tedious engineering works today. Last week he was filming a new tram in Liege and posts videos of his travels around Europe by bus and train on his YouTube channel. He says that when he isn't thinking about quantum computing, he thinks about the management, integration and optimisation of public transport networks.
Remarkably, he finds that Britain's myriad small rail and bus companies adds a stimulating element of confusion that his former home in Hong Kong lacks. In what can only be described as a unique example of a 'glass half full' attitude, he thinks the uniformity, efficiency and punctuality of Hong Kong's public transport is 'boring'.
'Some of my friends don't really understand. Everything arrives on time and the trains don't break down,' he says. He sees the frequent breakdowns and service failures on the rail network as puzzles to be figured out (unlike regular passengers, who find them a pain in the proverbial).
I've got until Surbiton, on the London/Surrey border, before the rail replacement bus section of the line kicks in. It doesn't take long to get there, but it's quite a feat that we've actually made it anywhere: the 455 electric locomotive pulling the eight carriages from Woking to Surbiton is, after more than 60 years in service, showing its age. Streaks of dirt mar its once cheery orange, blue and yellow livery. Inside, the plum-coloured plush on the seats is wearing thin. A new blue and silver livery has been unveiled to mark South Western Railway's transition back into public ownership, but the new trains are not all in service yet.
'The 455 is a reliable workhorse but it is in need of replacement,' says driver Richard Guy.
After 13 minutes of views of suburban gardens through the slightly grimy windows, at 5.59am, it was all change. Further up the line, as the transport minister Heidi Alexander is preparing to pull out of Waterloo on a very short journey for the TV cameras – on a train with the brand-new silver and royal blue livery of Labour's flagship Great British Railways – we're decanted off the train at Surbiton to find the rail replacement bus to Clapham Junction. It's a bumpy double decker, and depressingly, it's going to take about an hour.
Still, the bus is easy to find, and the service slowly fills up as people trickle off the train. Network Rail engineers in fluorescent orange overalls sit downstairs.
They do not look sorry that their engineering work has disrupted the bank holiday timetable. Jithin Thomas, 27, goes further: 'I hope the administrative overhaul [the network co-ordinating more closely with the train operating companies] that's likely to happen will please passengers.'
To be honest, though, it is unlikely that many commuters will notice any difference, at least at first.
Just as privately owned South Western Railway has been replaced by publicly owned South Western Railway, the management structure and staff will stay the same – for now, it is just the ownership that has changed. But Thomas says profits will now go into improving the service instead of investors' bank accounts.
One boring hour later, the bus arrives at Clapham Junction so that we can rejoin the tracks and catch the train into London. It's a long way from platform 15 (the closest platform to where our bus arrives) to platform three, but no one has to run – there's an interminable 26-minute wait before the connecting train leaves for Waterloo.
Today Clapham Junction station, normally bustling even on a Sunday, is like the scene from the zombie movie 28 Days Later, where the hero emerges after being unconscious in hospital to find London's streets deserted. There were no zombies (apart from sleep deprived passengers), but several of our fellow train-then-rail-replacement-bus passengers give up on the last leg of the (second) train, and hunt down one of a number of other, regular buses that connect Clapham to Waterloo.
Tam is also bored waiting for the Waterloo train, and says he might catch a regular bus instead. This is a big deal for him: he loves buses like he loves trains, just not quite as much.
He points out the irony that the rail replacement bus is operated by FirstGroup, the same company that actually ran South Western Railway when it began 29 years ago. A rail replacement bus also replaced the train on the day that John Major's privatised rail network came into service in 1996. Clearly, old habits die hard.
Still, the 26-minute wait at Clapham is over, and on we board again… and after 11 minutes, we finally arrive at our final stop. The 28 miles from Woking to Waterloo has taken two hours and 10 minutes, an average speed not much faster than the stagecoaches that would have carried passengers when Waterloo was given its name in 1848.
Usually, the average length of a journey from Woking to London Waterloo, without engineering works, is 33 minutes. Today it has taken four times as long.
From his eyrie above the concourse at Waterloo station, an eagle-eyed South Western Railway manager spots our cameras and comes dashing down to explain why the first renationalised train was a bus.
He says it was a decision taken for the benefit of passengers who would normally have caught the 06:14, the first train on a Sunday morning. To avoid making them late getting to Waterloo and possibly missing a connection, they made the first train especially early to take into account the delays caused by engineering work.
It is an elegantly plausible solution, but what about that 26-minute wait at Clapham Junction? It might take a quantum physicist to work it out – but he is already on a different bus.
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