What was my Southern Experience like?

 

 

Hello everyone, today i take you on my first ever Southern Class 171 Train ride from Ashford International down to Ham street which is actually just outside Ashford it's self. Anyway today's ride was an amazing experience as i have never travelled on a train that is still in commercial passenger use that runs on diesel. Moving onto the Customer service of both the train operator and the Train station staff. The train station staff where very friendly and helpful, as they saw I was filming the trains they even told me that a class 37 would be arriving at the station later that day.  One member of staff in particular helped us get to the correct platform and was very interested in our filming. As we got on the train the ticket officer on  board came up to us and informed us in quite an arrogant way that we had to be in  the front 3 coaches despite us not hearing this information yet. This was the only downside to the trip as the manor he spoke to us in.

The cleanliness of the train was phenomenal even though the train is older than some of the Southeastern trains it doesn’t have seemed to have as much ware and tear, this tells me that Sothern’s priorities are to keep there trains in a good serviceable condition.

Now onto the experience on the train aside staff and cleanliness. This is the first ever time I have travelled on a class 171 and when the train pulled into the station both me and my friend where very excited to be traveling on a diesel train.
 

Overall my Southern Experience was great, I brought a ticket from Canterbury west to Ham street via Ashford International. South eastern high speed (Class 395) to Ashford from Canterbury and the same on the return. Now I paid £6.05 for this under 16’s ticket on a Saturday which means all day off peak travel.