Rail passengers in Sussex have had to put up with almost half their trains running late in the past year.

As thousands of people head home by train for Christmas this weekend, figures released yesterday show Southern trains only ran on time 56% of the time.

Network Rail published the “real” delay figures of UK train companies for the 12 months ending – ending December 7.

The figures, which are known as “right time” statistics, consider a train to be late if it has arrived 60 seconds later than signposted.

A spokeswoman for Southern said: “Our righttime figure is extremely disappointing, both for us and our passengers. We operate more than 2,300 services a day over a small geographical area, which means that when disruption occurs there is a larger knock-on effect to services, which impacts on our performance measures."

Southern has the fourth worst “right time” figures out of all national train firms.

The only firms with lower “right time” figures than Southern are Virgin Trains, East Coast Trains, and Crosscountry, which had the worst percentage of on- time trains at 44.5%.

Chiltern trains had the highest percentage of on-time trains at 87%.

Megan Yates, 19, who is travelling home to London this weekend said: “Trains have been pretty unreliable recently. The last time I travelled to London my train was almost 35 minutes late and almost caused me to miss an important engagement.”

Southern claims it is working hard with Network Rail to reduce infrastructure failures across the network.

A Southern spokeswoman said: “We are renewing our efforts to ensure that we run as robust a fleet of trains as possible to improve our performance throughout 2014.”

It’s hope that a new platform at Gatwick, new points at Stoats Nest near Purley and improvement to signalling at London Victoria will ease congestion.

Jimmy Nicholls, 22, who has commuted from London to Brighton for the last three months said: “For the most part delays have been tolerable, but there were several occasions when I was stuck waiting for over half an hour which is far too long.”

However, according to a survey by the European Commission of 26,000 travellers, UK train passengers are still the most satisfied in Europe.

Southern paid out £805,000 to passengers whose trains were delayed in the past year.

Under the Delay Repay scheme, passengers can claim compensation from train firms if they have been delayed for more than 30 minutes.

To see the results of the Network Rail survey yourself, visit http://www.networkrail.co.uk/about/performance