Thousands of SW Trains passengers suffered disrupted journeys this afternoon and evening, 12 October. Delays of an hour or more affected journeys in and out of Waterloo.
Problems started with a power failure at Clapham Junction. This led to signal problems that had a significant impact on services.
As SW Trains battled to get the service back on track stopping services to Woking were taken out of the schedule.
I travelled on a delayed service towards London which terminated at Woking. This left a large number of passengers struggling through Woking station to get the next London bound train. Their passage along Platform 5 was compounded by the large number of passengers waiting for a south bound train.
I have nothing but praise for the guard on my train who kept passengers fully informed when we came to a halt outside Woking due to congestion at the station. He didn't have a lot of information to share but he told us what he knew and provided regular updates.
Praise should also be heaped on staff running the @SW_Trains Twitter feed. They gave out information and answered queries throughout. Their quantity of tweets was so great they exceeded their "tweet" limit.
Trains returned to normal around 10pm. Now there are questions to be asked about how this incident developed:
- what caused the power failure at Clapham Junction?
- how did the power failure affect signals
- given the incident happened early in the afternoon why did it take so long to get trains back on a track
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