National Express East Anglia is seeking an urgent meeting with the rail regulator after ”Network Rail”s failure to return the railway back to normal service following Easter engineering works.”
There was commuter chaos after train services to and from Liverpool Street were affected by severe delays and cancellations yesterday (25 March). Bus services were laid on where possible, and passengers were asked to use other trains where their tickets were valid.
”After the New Year overruns, Network Rail gave us assurances that our customers would not face problems following the Easter engineering work,” said National Express East Anglia managing director Andrew Chivers. ”We robustly challenged them about their plans prior to the holiday weekend and we were assured everything that needed to be done had been done.
”Once again, we have been let down and this morning's inconvenience for our customers has been unacceptable. We will now seek urgent discussions with Network Rail and the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) to get to the bottom of this incident and ensure that whatever corrective action is necessary is taken without delay.”
He said a number of buses had been available as a contingency for any overruns but that ”the scale of the problems was only communicated to us in the early hours of this morning,” making it ”extremely difficult” to put alternative arrangements in place.
National Express also said a Network Rail media statement had claimed the cause of the delay was not related to the planned Easter works, while it ”understands” that they were.
Network Rail refuted the operator”s claim, with route director Patrick Hallgate saying: ”Passengers don”t care about the cause of a train delay, only that their train is delayed. We informed National Express of the problem early this morning as soon as possible. At the end of the day, whatever the reason, our infrastructure was the problem, we have acknowledged that and sincerely apologised to everyone who has been caught up in the disruption.”
Network Rail said that is was a signal failure affecting several sets of points which caused the problems, and that this ”didn”t form part of the Easter work”. A temporary ”fix” was put in place to allow some services to resume at 08.40 yesterday morning, until engineers could carry out permanent repairs last night.
” Network Rail has been warned by the ORR that there must be improvement in punctuality and reliability on its Western route ” where services are operated by First Great Western.
”Now is the time for some committed and cooperative work by all concerned,” said ORR director of access planning and performance, Michael Lee.
”If targets for this route are not met in the near future, then the consequences for Network Rail could be severe. I do not propose, at this stage, to look into whether Network Rail is in breach of its licence ” but all parties should be clear that this is an option that may be open in the future.”