As a Sussex resident all my life, I find letters with the content such as that supplied by Mike Macfarlane, (Letters, August 17) incredibly irritating and ill-informed.

I cannot believe that as someone who “travels the country using railways” he doesn’t know his facts. I am no apologist for the railways but surely he knows that the First Capital Connect trains are starting to be replaced now, with the very facilities he mentions are missing, but there have been some massive delays, which have been notified with big posters at the stations.

The First Capital Connect trains he mentions are the same ones that have been running since the service started in the 80s and have not altered apart from a refit here or there. True, the trains are old, tired and noisy but its a bit like complaining about your car as you drive it to the scrapyard.

There are two real problems with the service from Brighton to London. The first one is a lack of capacity. There is only one up and one down line from Haywards Heath to Brighton and the bottleneck situation around London Bridge.

To create a four-line railway to Brighton involves doubling (or replacing) at least three viaducts (including one of the longest in the country), doubling the width of three major tunnels, as well as doubling the width of the trackbed up to Haywards Heath.

The second issue is the myopic view that some commuters in Brighton seem to have about their journey into London.

They seem to forget that there are huge numbers of people who live between Brighton and Croydon who also want to travel into London.

Until the capacity issues are fixed, Brighton commuters wont be able to live in a bubble of their own and will have to continue to share the majority of their trains with the rest of the commuters in Sussex.

David Jefferies, Rastrick Close, Burgess Hill