Cable thieves caused huge train delays

TRAIN bosses have today apologised for huge delays of up to four hours after cable thieves struck on the line between London and Ipswich.

Commuters were left stranded for between one and a half and four hours on Thursday evening after thieves cut through track-side signalling equipment to steal cable.

National Express East Anglia has apologised for the chaos and admitted the disruption to the main line trains was the worst in some time.

The problem was originally put down to a signalling problem in the Marks Tey area but it later emerged that vandalism was the cause of thousand of disrupted journeys.

Rush hour trains were forced to wait before being manually guided through the affected stretch of railway.

One angry passenger, who did not want to be named said: “I experienced the worst delay ever on my journey from London.

“The 7pm service from Liverpool Street arrived in Ipswich at 11.27pm, three and a quarter hours late. Most of the evening services were similarly delayed.”

The passenger added train staff had told them that contractors working on a level crossing had severed the electrics and broken a water main, but it has now emerged that it was cable thieves who had caused the problem.

A spokesman for National Express said: “We suspect the average delay for passengers was around one-and-a-half to two hours but there will have been services that suffered more extreme delays.

“When there is that level of impact on signalling each train must be talked past each signal in order to protect the safety of passengers and when it happens on a particularly busy section of railway it can result in very severe delays.

“We apologise to passengers for the inconvenience they experienced on Thursday evening. The trains generally run well and punctually but this was the most disruption we have seen for some time.”