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The UK’s rail network owner on Thursday warned of severe disruption for the remainder of the day around Manchester after power supply problems at a critical signalling centre halted services on important parts of the network, forcing hundreds of cancellations.
Network Rail said no trains were able to run between Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria and Bolton because of the problem, which started at 2pm.
Seven train operators — including Avanti West Coast, operator of the London to Glasgow West Coast main line, and TransPennine Express, operator of the main lines between north-west England and Yorkshire — announced scores of train cancellations as a result.
The outage is one of the most serious problems on the UK’s rail network since a power cut shut down services in large swaths of England and Wales in August 2019.
Network Rail said: “Currently no trains can run from Manchester Piccadilly through to Manchester Victoria and Bolton, impacting services right across the North West network.”
It said some trains were running south and east of the city towards Stockport but were also subject to delays.
Chris Wright, Network Rail North West route director, apologised to passengers affected by the power issues, which were causing “significant delays” to trains through Manchester.
He said: “While some services are now running, major disruption is expected for the rest of the day.”
Network Rail, which is government-owned, did not specify where the problem that led to the failure had taken place.
Signalling for the Manchester area is concentrated at the Manchester Rail Operating Centre, a facility near Ashburys station in south-east Manchester that opened in 2014.
The operator gave no indication of what had caused the failure. It is likely to prove challenging to recover from such a significant signalling failure because operators will want to be certain that conditions are safe before services can be restarted.
In 2003, during one previous blackout, some passengers forced open doors on standing trains and started walking down the tracks, making it too dangerous to resume services.
Electricity distribution networks in Greater Manchester are owned and run by SP Electricity North West. The company said it was investigating whether an outage on its network had affected the area earlier on Thursday.
As well as Avanti and TransPennine Express, the problem was affecting services in the Manchester area run by CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, London Northwestern Railway, Northern and Transport for Wales.
Manchester’s Metrolink tram network was not affected.
While mostly reliable, modern rail signalling systems, operated from a small number of huge centres, can be victims of sudden catastrophic failures.
In June, Germany’s entire national rail network was briefly halted by a problem with the network’s mobile communications system.
