Standing on a snowy station platform with little idea when your train will come should be a thing of the past. At least that is what Southeastern Trains hopes, after attracting considerable criticism during December and January’s heavy weather.

The company saw its fleet of trains suffer a series of failures during the snow and was forced to put on an emergency timetable. However, the way it communicated that timetable to passengers came under attack from fed-up commuters and as a result, its communications strategy has been revamped.

Web content manager Astrid Fleming reckons SET’s new website will make all the difference. In January the website had to be replaced with a single page as it was about to collapse under the weight of people logging on. On January 6 this year it was being hit with 8,000 hits per minute - compared to 700 on a normal day - but the new site has coped with everything SET has thrown at it.

Miss Fleming said: "We’ve also updated our e-mail journey alerts and SMS messages. It used to require you to register on our website, but not any more. It’s frequent and detailed and you can specify which trains you are interested in and on more than one route."

And it’s not just weather that can cause disruption, as passengers who were caught up in the trouble caused by a lineside fire near London Bridge this year will attest.

On an operational level, SET and Network Rail staff are now sitting alongside each other in the Kent Integrated Control Centre and incident room in central London, which is where decisions on emergency timetabling are made. Trains failing in Kentish snow are usually victims of ice on the third rail - which powers the trains - so while SET is trying to make its fleet of 375 Electrostars and 465s more robust, Network Rail is also reviewing how it can help.

SET’s Jon Hay-Campbell added: "Over the next few months Network Rail is going to provide a resolution as to how they are going to manage it, although of course if we get as much snow as we did last time, we are never going to be able to provide a normal service. Before Christmas last year we didn’t have the emergency timetable ready but by the January 7 snow we were able to implement so that our passengers knew it was going to be there.

"We’re trying to be open and honest with passengers."

Last year another rail company operating in the South East tried to run a normal timetable, only to find its trains catching fire - amongst other problems - so SET reckons that admitting there is a problem is a better way forward than pretending everything is going to be fine.

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