WHETHER by taxi, bus, car or some team effort, commuters have undertaken all manner of means to beat the rail strikes and battle into work.

Now one man has a new train of thought to help people get to work - he wants to hire his own locomotive.

Steve Salford hopes commuters will get onboard with the idea of having his train running along the Sussex coastway routes from Chichester and Eastbourne when there is no direct service to London on strike days.

The 44-year-old is not doing it to get himself to work – he is self-employed from his home near Rustington.

He said: "I am proposing to do this in the worst-affected areas. If you're on the coastway line you've got no direct services at all during a strike."

The West Sussex train would stop at selected stations such as Angmering, Worthing, Shoreham and Hove, with the East Sussex one running from Eastbourne via Hampden Park, Lewes and possibly Haywards Heath to the capital. Each train would carry about 500 people, with arrivals in London from 8am and departures from 5.40pm.

Even though he might be hard-pushed to get his plan into action for any strikes this month, in the long-term Steve wants to source his own trains and resurrect a version of the London Brighton & South Coast Railway, which ran up until the 1920s.

He said: "Let's put the Great back into Britain, back into rail."

But to charter a train for a day costs thousands of pounds. Steve, with his track record of working on the railways, thinks he is the man to get the job done where legions of commuters believe Southern has failed.

He said: "If I worked for Southern now I would try to sort as much of this out as possible with the train crews available.

"We have a duty to get people home.

"I also intend on having a trolley service available for light drinks, snacks, sandwiches and pastries."

Steve served with Gatwick Express and then Midland Railway as a train dispatcher on the platform with a whistle and a light, and then working in a restaurant car.

Steve has set up a Facebook group to put out the right signals and gauge the response.

He said: "As of present this group is just there to see how much interest there is likely to be for this kind of service to be provided.

"We are trying to get the word out there. We really need to get things out there to make people aware."

He cannot start up his train empire just yet because timetabling a regular service would require an agreement with the Department for Transport. He thinks it would take at least two years' work to set up properly.

For more information, search London Brighton & South Coast Railway on Facebook.