We would like to apologise to all our customers who have experienced delays on our services today.

Last night we took a decision about the service we would run based on the weather forecast which indicated that low temperatures overnight would mean that the snow/ice on the ground would clear less quickly than previously thought. Based on this forecast we placed a 60 mile per hour speed limit on all our services this morning in order to avoid the build up of snow/ice on the underside of trains which can cause damage to the tracks and signalling when it becomes dislodged and to lessen the risk of damage to the motors on our electric trains. Because of the slower running speed it was not possible to run as many trains into London Liverpool Street as usual without causing severe congestion and delays to services. These changes were advertised via our website on Sunday evening.

This morning we encountered a number of problems related to the Winter weather: Due to damage to our Metro (London-Shenfield stopping service) trains it was necessary to cancel a small number of services. Points failures at Manningtree and between Colchester and Colchester Town also caused delays to services through these areas.

At around 08:00 a signalling failure outside London Liverpool Street severely restricted our access into platforms 5-10 at London Liverpool Street The platforms remained open for much of the morning however the resulting congestion caused further delays to customers on our Mainline (Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Clacton and Chelmsford to London) and Southend/Southminster services. Engineers worked to restore the signalling to normal, however they were unable to fully access the fault until after the morning rush hour without fully closing the line into London Liverpool Street and so repairs took longer than anticipated. This signalling failure re-occured at 17:30 disrupting some services during the evening rush hour and engineers were already on site to fx the problem but some trains had to be started from Stratford/Shenfield to allow engineers access to work on the line without causing further congestion and disruption to other services at Liverpool Street.

At around 10:30 a fault with the electrical connection between two trains caused a train to break down blocking the Norwich-bound line from Colchester causing significant disruption of up to 2 hours whilst the train was moved.  In order to return the train service to normal it was necessary to terminate some trains short of their destination and to cancel some services.

We are pleased to report that there is currently a good service operating on all routes this evening and would like to remind customers that due to planned route improvement tonight, buses will be replacing trains between Shenfield and Witham after 22:00 this evening.

Thank you for your patience today. We plan to run a full service tomorrow morning and will update our website again at 06:30

http://www.greateranglia.co.uk/about-us/news/2012/02/train-service-update-at-...