MORE frequent and less crowded trains are being promised by rail company Southern after it ordered dozens of new carriages.
The company signed an order for 40 more carriages last week, bringing the total number of new carriages ordered by the rail operator (but not yet in service) to 170.
Southern's services include trains from Mole Valley stations into London Victoria, with its wider network covering London, Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire.
Rail chiefs are promising the new carriages will make a noticeable difference to passengers once they are brought into operation at the end of the year.
Chris Burchell, managing director of Southern, said: "These additional vehicles will provide much-needed capacity on our network."
A spokesman for Southern added: "The additional carriages will provide increased capacity on the Southern network from December 2013.
"It's part of a wider plan which should see rail travel across the South East become less congested and have a more frequent service."
At present there are times when all Southern's normal carriages are in use but not all its trains are. More carriages will therefore allow more services to be run.
The spokesman added: "The bottleneck for our passengers is London Bridge. We're aiming to get 26 trains per hour going through that route by 2018. At the moment, there are eight."
The company claims such improvements will have a "knock-on effect" across its network.
The present Southern service can call on a fleet of 300 trains and 1,075 carriages, with 2,284 services run on weekdays, 2,076 on Saturdays and 1,242 on Sundays.
Some 447,000 passenger journeys are made each day on Southern trains.
