I was brought up in Horsham, the next major town south of Crawley, so you can take it as a combination of partisanship but also experience when I tell you Crawley ain't exactly the most beautiful part of West Sussex and isn't somewhere I'd choose to raise my kids ;-).

That said, that line and area is major commuter belt - the downside is that house prices reflect that, the upside is that for all it's traditional for us to moan, the trains are fast, frequent and run all day and late at night (anyone in the south who complains about trains needs to spend some time here up north...) Ferrovia also have the honour of making our trains look like a model of reliability in my experience, so you shouldn't have any surprises on that score :-)