Fourth day of Tube misery for London travellers

Tube travellers have been hit with a fourth successive day of problems.

The London Underground Image by NAPARAZZI / CC BY-SA 2.0

The latest incident – during the heart of the morning rush-hour – was a signal failure at Tower Hill.

This led to severe delays anti-clockwise on the Circle line and delays between Earl’s Court and Westminster on the District line.

Three lines experienced hold-ups in Monday morning’s rush hour, while two incidents led to part-suspensions and severe delays for many hours to the Central line on Tuesday.

Yesterday’s problem was on the Bakerloo line, which had to be suspended between Queen’s Park and Elephant & Castle after a fire alert at Piccadilly Circus and a signal failure at Paddington.

During the days of delays, the RMT transport union has expressed criticism of London Mayor Boris Johnson and raised concerns about all-night weekend running which will be introduced on the Underground in September.

Today the union’s general secretary Mick Cash said: “As the week of train and infrastructure breakdowns continues today, Londoners will be rightly asking why the mayor, who is responsible for the cuts across the Tube network, is off elsewhere.

“The problems we have seen this week are a taster of what we can expect when the added pressure of continuous weekend running is thrown into the mix.”

There were also morning rush-hour hold-ups on main line rail services.

A signalling problem at London Bridge, where there is already disruption due to long-term engineering work, led to delays to trains run by the Southern company.

Also, passengers with the First Great Western, Heathrow Connect and Heathrow Express train companies were held-up by a signalling problem between Hayes & Harlington and Southall in west London.

This caused delays in and out of Paddington station.

(Press Association)