HAMPSHIRE commuters and passenger campaign groups are fearing there will be further chaos on the south’s rail network weekend as the hot weather continues.

They fear a repeat of last weekend when hundreds of commuters experienced delays, dirty seats and overcrowding.

A number of incidents on the network, including a track defect near Totton on Saturday and a severe signalling problem between Southampton and Basingstoke last week created queues at major rail terminals across Hampshire.

Network Rail also imposed speed restrictions as the heatwave threatened to buckle rails which led to delays, on average, of 10-15 minutes since Saturday.

One commuter, who did not want to be named, was travelling from London Waterloo to Southampton Central and filmed footage of the queues at Basingstoke station showing the conditions in which commuters were left .

She said: “It’s completely unacceptable – there was no staff around at all,

Laura Head, who was travelling from Surbiton to Waterloo, tweeted a picture to South West Trains of a packed railway carriage at the weekend.

She said: “Twenty-seven degrees and you have cancelled so many trains that there are hundreds of your paying customers shoved into a train with no air-con. There is no room to breathe! How is this legal?”

Jeremy Varns, from campaign group South West Trains Watch, has criticised the company for “premium-pricing a product that has poor service”.

“Over the last few months before any franchise announcement was made, the service has gone completely downhill and commuters are becoming fed up.

“Even the smallest delay can bring the whole network to a halt and can build up big queues at railway stations with no staff to even help passengers, it’s absolutely awful.”

Lianna Etkind, public transport campaigner at the Campaign for Better Transport, said: “There is good practice elsewhere in the rail industry that shows that this needn’t happen and that disruption can be dealt with efficiently. The rail industry needs to get much better at this.

“We expect the new franchise holders to bring in proper management plans for disruption when they take over in the summer.”

In response to the findings, a statement from South West Trains said: “Regarding the weekend, our staff provided regular updates on trains, in stations and online and provided refreshments to affected passengers while Network Rail worked to repair the issues to allow a full service to resume.”

It added that “compensation arrangements” were available on its website but did not respond to our other findings when it was put to them.

First MTR will take over the running of the South West Trains franchise on August 20 this year after Stagecoach, which has run the franchise since 1996, lost it in March.