Arsenal travel to visit one of our bogey teams on Sunday when they travel to St Marys to take on Southampton. We won this fixture last season when Southampton were already halfway to their beach holidays, but we hadn’t won any of the previous 5 League visits to the South Coast. But forgetting about whether the football could be a nightmare, Arsenal fans must be prepared for chaos just trying to get from London to the ground as the South Western Trains Website reports that all lines in the Southampton area will be closed all day Sunday for maintenance work.
Here are details of all the closures and where you will expect to find replacement buses, which has been provided through the Saints fansite TheUglyInside…..
Trains between London Waterloo and Weymouth will be replaced by buses between Southampton Airport Parkway and Brockenhurst.
Stopping services to Poole will only run between Brockenhurst and Poole.
Replacement buses will run between Eastleigh and Brockenhurst, connecting with the London Waterloo to Portsmouth via Eastleigh services.
Fast buses will also run between Eastleigh, Southampton and Bournemouth. Long distance passengers for Bournemouth and stations to Weymouth should use these buses where possible.
There will be no South Western Railway train services between Southampton Central and Portsmouth.
Replacement buses will run between Southampton Central and Fareham, connecting with other train services between Fareham and Portsmouth.
South Western Railway services to and from Salisbury will be replaced by buses between Romsey and Eastleigh via Southampton Central.
Great Western Railway services will call at Eastleigh instead of Southampton Central. These trains will also serve Chandler’s Ford.
The above does not indicate on how your will get to Southampton Central beyond Southampton Parkway, although looking at the trainline it appears that there will be trains running into Southampton Central, although the journey time appears to be anywhere between 15-26 minutes (as opposed to the usual 8 mins)
Either way if you are coming via London in order to make the game, according to the trainline you would need to be on a train departing Waterloo no later than 9.15, this would be due in at Central at 11.05 if on time and would mean changing at Southampton Parkway.
Technically you could get the 9.35 getting into central at 11.20, but this would cut it tight to get to the game assuming a 25 minute walk to the stadium and any delays would mean you would probably miss the kick off.
Our advice is to keep checking the trainline.com as well as South Western Railways websites, the links of which are below…
https://www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey/planned-improvements/decembe
https://www.thetrainline.com
Finally…an article that isn’t about how fantastic we were against Utd!
Thanks for the information admin. A friend is travelling, so will let him know.
Useful piece of info for all the supporters travelling. Let’s just hope that we win that one..
You can think the ever fan focused Prem League who were told all about the engineering works and asked not to move it to Sunday via formal channels, for exactly that reason, but did anyway.