A new operator has a honeymood period - a time to get his feet under the table during which you can't realistically expect an immediate and dramatic fix to issues such as cancellations.   First have in fact impressed me by how quickly they fixed certain things; we may have chucked at the uniform change on day 1, but it WAS impressive.   We may have felt that they were impolite in rebadging the stations before they even operated them, but it WAS impressive.  And after a series of "end of term" cancelleations by Wessex trains, they were impressive by how they cut their cancellation rate on our service in the first few months - from 9 cancellations in April (their first month), they dropped to none at all in May and just 2 in June.  What an excellent honeymoon.

But what has happened since?

In July, they were nearly back to April levels, with 8 Monday-to-Friday trains cancelled.

For August, we've already been notified of no less that 30 un-necessary cancellations to come (and I'm being generous and NOT counting the 8 trains not running on Bank Holiday Monday)

September ... we're already been notified of a sufficient cancellations to make it worse than July ....

Am I logging a series of co-incidences here, or something else?