An electricity supply failure has caused disruption across much of England's rail network, hitting services in Greater Manchester, the Midlands and the north-west of England. According to Sky News, the problem was traced to a power failure at a Network Rail communications and operations centre in the Manchester area. The knock-on effect quickly spread across the network, with the north of the country and the Midlands among the areas most heavily affected by the disruption.
Travel correspondent Simon Calder explained that the power went off in the network operations centre that Network Rail runs in the Manchester area at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. As a direct result of that failure, the signalling on the network basically shut down. With signalling out of action, the trains immediately had to come to a halt, leaving services unable to run safely through the affected part of the country.
The scale of the disruption stretched across a wide area of the country. According to the reporting, the problems affected a whole swathe of the network running from Carlisle in the north down to the West Midlands. Any trains heading up the west coast main line looked likely to be caught up in the disruption as well, given how central that route is to services running through the north and the Midlands.
Rebuilding the network after the failure was said to be proving very, very difficult. Because of the way rail travel works, with services and connections tied together across the country, the breakdown ended up affecting effectively everybody trying to travel. Sky News reported that the failure could have a knock-on effect across the rest of the rail network, well beyond the areas where the power problem first struck.
The impact was visible on departure and arrivals boards at major stations. Looking at the Manchester Piccadilly arrivals board, the correspondent pointed to cancelled trains coming in from Glasgow, from York, from Norwich and from Manchester Airport. The list of scrapped services gave a sense of how far the disruption reached, pulling in long-distance routes from Scotland and the east of England as well as local airport connections.
There were some early signs of the situation beginning to settle in parts of the region, with the problems in the West Midlands said to seem to be easing. In the meantime, passengers who had been caught up in the disruption were being encouraged to apply for compensation if their journeys had been affected. The advice reflected the widespread nature of the delays and cancellations caused by the loss of power at the operations centre.