Campaign to keep village’s current London commuter train service
02/12/2025
Chiltern Railways says the service will now be a longer train and won’t fit into the station
A campaign has been launched urging Chiltern Railways not to remove a regularly used London commuter service from King’s Sutton.
Currently at least a dozen people catch the 6.41am train which, after Bicester, heads directly into the city, arriving at 7.45am. This leaves enough time for onward tube journeys so workers can be in their offices for 9 o’clock.
But, from December 14 Chiltern are introducing a new timetable, which replaces the 6.41am direct service with an earlier 6.19am service, which takes longer as it stops at a number of stations along the route.
The next, later option involves catching a service into Banbury before heading to London to arrive at 8.35am, which doesn’t allow enough time for onward journeys across the city.
King’s Sutton resident Sam Robertson regularly uses the 0641 train and describes the change as “a reduction in service for no reduction in price”.
She said: “I’ll be leaving my house at 6am and I’ll be getting back to my house at 8.15pm in order just to go to work in London, which is technically only an hour away.
“It just seems preposterous that given the traffic from outside London into London, that they should give us such a poor and limited option to get into London for 9am.”
Villagers have launched a petition urging the operator to retain the current service. So far that has received around 300 signatures.
Sam said: “King’s Sutton is an attractive place to live because of the train and the commuter service that we have and therefore, if prospective buyers are thinking of buying in the village, this will probably put them off. So that impacts our house prices.
“We also don’t have a bus service here. The reason we don’t have a bus service in and out of the village is because we have a train station, but actually they’re reducing our train service effectively.”
In response Chiltern Railways told Banbury FM the change is due to the 0641 service being given extra carriages, meaning it now exceeds the maximum train length for Kings Sutton station.
The company’s spokesperson said: “We are introducing newer trains on the Chiltern network next year, increasing capacity across our route by 10,000 more seats a day from December 2026. In preparation for this, we need to change the timings and length of some of our services in the December 2025 timetable.
“The Kings Sutton service to London Marylebone at 6.41am will now depart at 6.19am. This is because the 6.41am service will be a longer train and Kings Sutton station can only take trains of five coaches or fewer, which limits the services that can call there.
“We understand this may be frustrating to customers from the station. Train timetables are changed nationally every six months to improve the overall function of the railway and adjustments are made to benefit the entire network.”
Published: by the Banbury FM News Team
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