So it looks like I may have been right about Network Rail’s dodgy maths. Or perhaps not. It depends who you listen to. All I know is that, as suspected, I didn’t get to work the day after a bank holiday weekend of engineering works. Neither did a lot of other people

Again.

It was almost inevitable.

Initial reports on the radio were cautious, speaking of delays rather than cancellations, but soon they got more serious, and it became a case of ‘don’t travel’, rather than ‘allow more time’. And then the school run kicked in and all of the buses that might have been used to ferry stranded passengers further down the line had to instead shuffle reluctant kids to their classrooms, and the line effectively shut down.

‘Engineering work due to be completed over the Easter weekend has overrun leading to delays for commuters,’ the BBC reported. ‘Operator National Express East Anglia said work due to finish on Monday had overrun and delays of up to an hour on the line up to Norwich were expected. The cause is signalling problems after track replacement at Shenfield.’

Delays of ‘up to an hour’ were the least of their worries when the line was effectively cut in two by the breakdown.

But Network Rail claimed that the delays were nothing to do with the renovations. In a press release entitled ‘Network Rail responds to National Express accusations‘ (and ‘accusations’ is a pretty strong word, by my reckoning), it said:

Network Rail has refuted the claim by National Express that it had been ‘misleading’ as to the cause of today’s problems at Shenfield.

Patrick Hallgate, Route Director, said: “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 apologise to everyone who has been caught up in the disruption.”

Network Rail clarified that a fault with the signalling system, affecting several sets of points (points number 2247 and 2250), that didn’t form part of the Easter work, was first picked-up in the early hours of this morning as the signalling system was being ‘rebooted’.

Whatever the reason, and whoever was to blame, the outcome was still the same. Thousands of delayed passengers up and down the line, many of whom - myself included - would have chosen to work at home.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about it, though, was the fact that I’d been so sure this would happen I had even brought home work that I could do from there before the Easter weekend, hoping I might be proved wrong.

I wasn’t.

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network+rail, shenfield, trains, train+travel

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