Good morning and welcome to Friday’s continued rail outage across the Midlands and north-west England.
While the outage that caused commuter chaos on Thursday afternoon and evening has continued into Friday, we’ll be bringing you the latest updates as they occur.
And, in case you missed it, here’s a summary of what went down yesterday:
– Chaos triggered by major power outage: An external power cut shortly before 2:00 PM affected over 400 postcodes in Manchester, cutting electricity to the Manchester Rail Operating Centre—the primary signalling control hub for North West England.
– Widespread rail disruption across eight operators: The resulting signalling failure halted services across Greater Manchester and the North West, causing severe delays and cancellations for Avanti West Coast, TransPennine Express, Northern, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, London Northwestern, Merseyrail, and Transport for Wales.
– Passenger evacuations onto tracks: In one severe instance, passengers stuck on a stranded train for over two hours between Deansgate and Salford Crescent had to be evacuated down ladders onto the tracks by railway staff and guided to a nearby car park.
– Emergency transport measures and ticket flexibility: To help stranded commuters, operators relaxed ticket restrictions and set up ticket acceptance across Manchester’s Metrolink tram network, local bus lines (such as TfGM and Stagecoach), and replacement bus routes between Liverpool Lime Street and Chester.
– Apologies issued, knock-on impact expected: Network Rail and operator executives issued formal apologies, warning that despite engineers working overnight to restore signalling, heavy disruption and cancellations would spill over into Friday morning due to trains and crew being out of position.