East Midlands Railway is urging passengers to check before travelling this morning due to major disruption across its Intercity network due to a signalling failure.
The signalling failure has occurred between Trent South Junction and Loughborough station and means all lines are closed.
Network Rail are already on site investigating the issue.
Current estimations are that the problem could be fixed by 10:30 am, but trains are not expected to start running again until 1 pm due to train and crew displacement.
A normal timetable is expected by 3 pm this afternoon.
A number of Intercity services are disrupted/cancelled, including trains between London St Pancras and Nottingham (which cannot run at all), London St Pancras and Sheffield (which will run and make additional calls at Kettering and Market Harborough).
Trains that run from Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln and Grimsby will no longer run between Leicester and Nottingham.
A replacement bus service will run between East Midlands Parkway and Nottingham, with ticket acceptance in place with London North Eastern Railway and Avanti West Coast.
Responses
There seem to be an awful lot of signalling failures lately with modern signalling. Might this be an opportune time to pause the relentless rush to modern forms of signalling and to leave the semaphore signalling that we still have in situ? One is still amazed at the seemingly ridiculous rush to re-signal Par and Truro earlier in the year!
With regular signal failures, points failures and the like, it does seem that Network Rail is just not keeping up with routine maintenance and seems to be operating in fire fighting mode – just responding to problems after they occur. This really isn’t good enough.