PARKING BAYS at Southampton Central station are going to be repainted and made wider by train operator South West Trains.

The move comes after a New Forest man successfully quashed a parking fine after he proved the spaces at the busy car park were too small.

Jago Lawless, 46, was dismayed after being slapped with an £80 penalty notice because his new car overlapped the lines by two inches of one tyre.

The naval architect, from Dibden Purlieu, had been driving his new Hyundi i10 for the first time before he parked at the station.

“I was especially keen to park easily in a parking space,” Mr Lawless said. “I am absolutely paranoid about not getting my cars dinked or dented by having doors of other cars being opened and hitting them.”

Mr Lawless said there were only a few parking spaces left that was a sensible size, but if he had parked straight in any of them, he would not have been able to open his door without hitting the vehicles next to him.

He added: “I had to park at a slight angle, which meant that my tyre was just on the white line.”

When the dad-of-three returned to his vehicle, he saw the parking ticket on his car’s windscreen for “not parking in a designated parking space”.

Mr Lawless, who is used to working on design specifications for some of the world’s largest ships, immediately whipped out his tape measure and found the width of his car from wing-mirror tip to wing-mirror tip measured 1.98 metres.

“Astonishingly, the parking space was only 1.978 metres wide,” he added.

“Just a couple of inches of my nearside front tyre were overlapping the white line. I was being charged an excess of more than nine times the daily parking charge."

Government guidelines suggest minimum dimensions for a car space of 4.8 metres by 2.4 metres.

A South West Trains spokesperson said Southampton Central car park dates from the days of nationalised British Rail - before guidelines were issued by Department for Transport on car parking spaces for new build facilities.

They added that enforcement at the facility is managed by a third-party company.

"We are aware of one case at Southampton Central where a penalty ticket was felt to have been wrongly issued,” the spokesperson said.

“As soon as the matter was drawn to our attention, we asked the company to ensure it was withdrawn.

"In addition, we will be remarking the small number of angled spaces in this car park to increase their width."