NOTE: The line has now reopened to trains
A Do Not Travel notice has been put in place after a freight train derailed on Wednesday (29th May).
Engineers are working to make the route safe for trains to resume, but at the time of writing, trains have been suspended on the West Coast Mainline north of Preston.
Avanti West Coast and TransPennine Express are both experiencing major disruption, with trains affected until the end of the day today.
Please check with your train operator for the latest travel advice
“We’re sorry to passengers affected by the derailment. We have specialist repair teams on site working as fast as they can to make the railway safe.
“Disruption is expected for the rest of the day, so we’re urging people to plan their journeys and check before they travel with their train operator or National Rail Enquiries.”
Kara Wood, Network Rail‘s acting North West route strategy director
Responses
How did they manage that ?
It does seem that train operating companies now just give up and cancel services whenever there is the slightest issue with the rail network or the weather.
I think this is partly due to the current obsession with “health and safety”, but it’s also a consequence of the current francising arrangements for the train operators. Since the Covid shutdowns, these operators are now just paid a fee for running an agreed train service, rather than the previous arrangement where they could make profits by improving and increasing their service, and suffered loss of revenue if they cancelled services.
So there is now no downside to cancelling trains – compensation to passengers is paid for by the Government and not the train operators, and they still get their fee because they can claim the cancellations were from factors outside their control.
Why have diversions not been organised via the Settle and Carlisle line ? Preston, Blackburn, Hellifield, Settle and on to Carlisle ….
You can’t get EMUs on those diesel lines
Cost-cutting measures stopped all that ages ago. Years back, diesel locomotives were attached at Preston and the trains “dragged” over the S&C to Carlisle and vice versa. However it was costing too much for the operators to keep their drivers route knowledge up to date, plus the operational expense of diverting the trains, so they put a stop to diversions and went for the cheaper options of putting buses on. Progress eh?
cant they usebth lines with speed restriction thereboth clear
What happened to single line working? Perhaps the people running today’s railway should read Gerry Finnes “I Tried to Run a Railway” to see how it should be done.
Won’t be an easy job re-railing those wagons as they are underneath live wires, not to mention the angle they are at.
Just de energise the OHLE, the WCML is bi directional so why can the opposite lines not be used ?.
This derailment happened a bit north of Oxenholme. So why have all trains been suspended north of Preston? Trains can still access Lancaster and the Barrow line via Carnforth without getting anywhere near Oxenholme.
It seems that recently, train companies just give up providing a service when there is any upset at all. Avanti seems the worst – it routinely terminates all services from the South at Preston even if there is just a weather warning from the Met Office for the North. And the Met office now issues such warnings if it’s just going to be a bit wet or windy