Buckled rail causes rush-hour chaos

London Evening Standard/London

Thousands of commuters were stranded after soaring temperatures caused the track into Waterloo station to buckle at the height of rush-hour.

Services on some of the busiest South West Trains routes were cancelled or delayed as engineers worked to remedy the kink in the track, while the network was also hit by signalling problems near Haslemere on one of the hottest days of the year.

Rail staff handed out bottled water at about 6pm to stranded passengers in the packed station. Engineers, who began their task at about 3pm, worked overnight as platforms one to four were put out of use.

Services to Dorking were cancelled and routes to Alton were badly affected. It was the second week in a row that passengers at Waterloo faced disruption because of the effect of heat on the track. Network Rail imposed a 20mph speed limit at last Monday evening’s peak.

Normal services resumed yesterday morning, but with no sign of the heatwave abating — temperatures are forecast to remain in the mid to high twenties in London into the weekend.

Mike Jones, 44, a technical consultant from Haslemere, who was among those stuck on the Waterloo concourse, called the service “shoddy”. Sam Trigger, 30, a civil servant from Farnborough, said: “It happens every four or five months so you just have to bear up. It would have been better if it wasn’t one of the hottest days of the year.”

Cancer Research worker Phil Whittaker, 36, from Woking, said: “It’s nice to see staff giving out water, and they are going around explaining so they’ve been pretty good.”

Network Rail said it was using hydraulic machinery to artificially stretch the rails. “The metal can reach temperatures far in excess of the surrounding air temperature. We have seen temperatures on our tracks of almost 50C this week. The network in general has coped well, however the ageing condition of our infrastructure in some places means we have had to impose speed restrictions.”