Gatwick Railway Station

Gatwick airport — passed. Gatwick railway station — no, not so much.
After disembarking your plane, passing security, picking up your luggage etc. you enter the «mixed-​zone» where the Airport transforms into a railway station. I’m not impressed.
Purchasing your ticket is fairly straight forward and the platform information monitors provide an alright information as to where to head.
So you arrive at the platform… and in my mind I’m sent back 20 – 30 years into an England that’s dirty, messy and really unpleasant. It’s a gut feeling but I’m close to say I’m feeling unsafe at that station, and it may just be my mind playing tricks upon me. Considering I’ve used it several times.

Never a pleasant experience.
As you exit the airport after queuing to get off the plane and then queuing for passport control you will be thrilled to find another queue for the ticket machines. They have staff on hand to help you since you won’t be able to find the ticket you want because the machines are so badly designed.
Traveling to London perhaps? (like 95% of the people coming through here)? A simple journey you might think… Take your pick from Gatwick Express for around £20, Southern trains around £15 (both taking around 30 mins to London Victoria.
Or you could pay £7.90 on the way out but strangely £10.20 heading in to London for Thameslink trains to London Bridge, Blackfriars or St. Pancras. If you want that cheapest ticket you will have to select St. Pancras but then an option ‘not via Underground’ or something otherwise it will try to route you via Victoria and throw in an Underground ticket on top. Why would you do that when there is a train that goes there directly? Good luck to any tourist arriving from another country.
We arrived late at night as so many travelers on one of the budget airlines do. I felt like a cup of tea. One place was open, in the station. Big sign saying Tea & Coffee amongst other thinngs. «I’m not serving hot drinks now» was the reply from the woman behind the counter. Oh, so you’re just open to annoy everyone then? Don’t you love that kind of non existent customer service?
Down on the platform it’s cramped, dark and feels hostile. Hardly any lighting apart from some fluorescent tubes right in the middle where there are few seats and crowds of people with luggage. The whole place is grotty and decrepit and feels like something off one of those drab films from the 1970’s.
A flagship for the joys of rail transport in the UK or just one of the worst examples?
The whole thing needs to be redesigned and rebuilt.

Gatwick Airport station is the railway station at London Gatwick Airport which provides a direct rail connection to London 2 miles away.
The station platforms are located to the east of the airport’s South Terminal, with the ticket office above the platforms. The station was one of 18 in the United Kingdom to be managed by Network Rail, but in 2012 day-​to-​day management was transferred to Southern.
Train services are provided by Gatwick Express, Southern, Thameslink and First Great Western.

Sunday night, heaving with passengers. No timetable boards, nobody on the information desk, huge queues. Welcome to London.
Gatwick is not my favourite airport, and that’s largely due to this train station, which is one of the most inefficient and unhelpful places you could possibly wish to find yourself in when you’re just off a plane.
The layout is extremely poor — self-​service ticket machines are on the left as soon as you come through from the south terminal, meaning that there is always a queue out of the door of people waiting to use them. The main ticket office is far across on the right, and in between the space is largely taken up by the escalators down to the platforms and the turnstiles to access those. And usually you have to fight your way through the throngs of people and luggage to get to those. The space is simply too small and too poorly laid out for the numbers of passengers passing through it.
Luckily, there is also a coffee stall, and tucked away beside that is a small information desk, which if you are lucky will actually be manned — not on this particular Sunday evening however. When it is manned, they are very helpful in sorting out your arrangements, and once the lady actually printed off a complete itinerary for me.
If, as many people do these days, you have bought your ticket in advance, there is nothing to help you find out which platform you need to get to for your train. Most stations have timetable boards on the wall where you can look up your destination and find out the time of the next train and where to get it. Gatwick has these downstairs, on the platforms. Not exactly helpful.
On this particular Sunday evening, there was no help to be had on the information stall, and only one staff member was visible by the turnstiles, beleaguered by the travelling hordes desperate to know where to go. I actually resorted to downloading a travel app on my phone to find out what platform I should be on; only then to discover that the trains weren’t running and that I had to get a replacement bus service to Guildford.
Back upstairs again, plead with the nice lady to let be back through the turnstiles, ask her where to get the bus from, told to wait by the information desk. There was no sign telling us this, apart from a notice on the destination board saying ‘replacement bus service’.
By the information desk I hovered, picking up a few other bamboozled travellers who were anxiously seeking reassurance about the replacement bus service. Eventually another staff member in a hi-​vis vest appeared and exhorted us to follow him, before setting off at such a blistering pace that he was around the corner before most of us even realised what was happening and we had to run to catch up with him.
Finally we’re on a bus and heading off into the night — not exactly the journey I was envisioning, although I did eventually got to my destination.
But come on South West Trains — your staff are doing wonders remaining calm and helping people, but there’s not enough of them on duty when it’s so busy, and the whole station layout is lacking in basic functionality. Put some timetables on the wall upstairs, or how about a huge route map on the wall showing all the destinations and routes? Even better, how about some computerised help screens?
For such a major international interchange station, this is a really poor introduction to Britain. One star only.

The Station at Gatwick airport is not a pleasant one. There is always constant chaos there due to the large number of travelers there, most of them do not know how to operate the ticket machines so it does lead to long waits. Further the stations does not really offer much else — there is no free wifi or any such things. The entrance and exit of the station also appears ill-​equipped to handle the number of people actually passing through the station.
Still go here often since it is easier for me to travel to/​from Gatwick than Heathrow.