SWR and NR apologise for “awful” service
South Western Railway and Network Rail have apologised to passengers after more than a week of significant disruption between Woking and London Waterloo.
Some commuters complained of taking more than four hours to complete what should have been one-hour journeys after a succession of separate failures, many in the Surbiton area, closed two or three of the four South Western Main Line tracks at a time.
The disruption continued across seven consecutive working days in late February, affecting many of the 100,000 passenger journeys a day through Britain’s busiest rail terminus.
SWR Managing Director Andy Mellors wrote to stakeholders: “I am very sorry for the disruption on parts of the network on February 25 and 26, which was caused by one of our main line train services suffering a major air leak at Berrylands, shortly after the driver reported hitting something, and a points problem in the Vauxhall area during the morning peak.
“It was not possible to move the train immediately. This meant that all trains heading out of London had to use the one remaining track.
“Given the position of the lines through Berrylands, it was necessary to block the remaining country-bound track, as well as the London-bound line used by fast services to enable response staff to access the stricken train.”
A South Western Railway source suggested the train’s power shoe had struck an object on the third rail, or been broken by damage to the rail.
The source added: “We have lost at least five shoes in the last week between Waterloo and Alton. The jury is still out on whether this is track or unit-related. This has wrecked the service. And a track possession overran, a set of points was not repaired. It was caused by a tamper causing damage to a cable and it was not repaired until after the peak.”
The previous week, a track circuit failure had caused long delays.
The problem was eventually traced to a faulty cable, but Network Rail said this took three days to identify.
Network Rail Wessex spokesman James Crook said: “We recognise that our performance has been extremely bad. It has been unacceptable and we apologise to passengers. We have had a number of infrastructure failures, mostly unrelated to each other, across parts of our network. They have caused service levels to drop to a level no one would consider acceptable.
“This is one of the busiest stretches of railway in the country, if not the busiest. There is a lot of strain. This is where new investment into the railway, £2 billion of it, will be focusing. We will be concentrating on maintenance and renewals to improve the service.”
Passenger K Childs posted a hotel receipt on Twitter, with a question to the SWR helpdesk: “Please tell me where I send my hotel bill. I tend to work from home nowadays to avoid this, but the one day I have to go to London this happens. I can’t get home. I kept it low for you and got a Travelodge.”
The most recent performance figures for SWR, which do not include the latest disruption, show 47% of main line trains arriving late. 17% are more than five minutes late, and 6% (more than one train in 20) arrive more than 15 minutes late. 3% of services do not run at all.
Last October, Network Rail Route Managing Director Becky Lumlock was suddenly replaced by Andy Thomas, in an attempt to tackle frequent infrastructure failures in the Wessex region.
At the time, the route had more than 50 temporary speed restrictions, and NR Chairman Sir Peter Hendy had to apologise directly to passengers for poor performance.