James Arthur George Gathercole, 39, targeted women on trains in two separate incidents on May 26 last year.
At 3.20pm he sat opposite a 27-year-old woman on a train from Motspur Park station to Wimbledon station.
Gathercole then proceeded to masturbate and expose his penis in the woman’s eyeline.
Then at 7.20pm the same evening he boarded a train at West Sutton station heading to London Blackfriars.
He sat down in the eye line of a 19-year-old woman and began masturbating and exposing his penis.
Gathercole was arrested after one of the victims bravely recorded the incident.
He was sentenced to two years and eight months in July by Recorder William Featherby KC, who said: “You’re a nuisance to women, and I think you’re a threat to women. You obviously get some sort of sexual gratification from cruising up and down the railways exposing yourself to lone women. It must stop.”
But now Gathercole has had his sentence reduced to just two years.
Recorder Featherby had previously that Gathercole should get one year and four months for each incident.
He explained: “The only things I really have to determine are whether to reduce your sentence below what I have seen is the maximum that’s been imposed on previous occasions, 16 months, after allowing one third off the maximum allowed for this offence, of 24 months, and whether to make the offences concurrent or consecutive.
“I see no reason whatsoever to depart from what previous judges have done … I’m going to make them consecutive, because these 16 month imprisonments don’t seem to keep you out of trouble.”
On December 20 appeal judges decided Recorder Featherby’s sentence was “manifestly excessive”.
Mr Justice Garnham, sitting at the Court of Appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice, said: “In our judgment a total sentence at twice the maximum allowed for these offences less only the discount for plea was manifestly excessive.
“A proper sentence, making a reasonable adjustment for totality, would have been 18 months on each count, less one-third for his plea.
In those circumstances, the appeal is allowed to the following extent: the sentences of 16 months on each count are quashed and a sentence of 12 months consecutive on each count, making a total of 24 months’ imprisonment, is substituted.”
