A 'Do not travel' instruction issued: a fault with the signalling has taken platforms 1-14 out of use.

Mark

 
The same signalling fault causing today’s major issues at Waterloo and across the SWR network happened on Saturday as well and I got caught up in it, fortunately not as bad as many people would have been with many services cancelled throughout the day.

Clearly a major issue somewhere in the singnalling system that has struck again.


edited title of thread to reflect the DO NOT TRAVEL instruction issued by SWR

 
It appears that trains are using platforms 1-14 again from around 11:00, give or take a few minutes. The Journeycheck and National Rail incident descriptions have been subtly amended.

There seems to have been a thought process concluding "If it can't get to Waterloo, it's not going anywhere" (Although a separate signalling issue near Eastleigh can't be helping). Not obvious why the 0611 Bournemouth to Weymouth was cancelled; attributed to a signalling failure. A couple of other services have been truncated to/from Dorchester instead of Weymouth, but most services along the Southampton-Weymouth route have been cancelled.

 
Got caught in the Saturday version, which had problems at Hilsea instead of Eastleigh.

Not bad going out from Reading, caught a delayed PMH train at BSK. Got off at Fareham and had my exercise /therapy. Got to Havant for the return and things were "more interesting". Southern seemed to be more affected, although I have had the impression before that their control is less flexible when there are difficulties. Got an on-time Waterloo via Guildford. A relatively new guard on, think it was her baptism of fire. It was announced as a semi-fast (sorry I still think in old Southern currency), after Petersfield "Driver call to Guard" she then announced it was a slow with Liss as the next stop. She later announced that the train would be terminating at GLD.

I had noticed in the morning that North Downs was one set down, more trains needing repair ... Needless to say that was the one that would have been my trip back to RDG. Consolation prize, time to refill the water bottle at their excellent water fountain before the next one.

 
From what I could see, almost the entire SWR network was frozen right from the start of the day because of the signalling failure affecting Waterloo. I guess this made sense from the point of getting the network up and running again once the signalling issue had been resolved rather than having trains and crew scattered across the network in the wrong place which happened on Saturday. Of course, this would have been no help whatsoever for those who were non-London passengers trying to get to work/school etc.

 
As it is showing disruption until 2100 today, that's some fault!
Surely with the number of Network Rail signalling engineers in that area, it could be 'reset' fairly quickly.

 

All lines reopened late morning IIRC. 

https://signalmaps.co.uk/#waterloo:1450

Takes a while to get things back to normal though apparently!

 
Ironically SWR have a meet the manager session this afternoon/evening at Waterloo. The managers won’t have many people to talk to as they wouldn’t have made it into London this morning.

 
Reading that the signalling at Waterloo has gone down AGAIN this evening so it clearly isn’t fixed which Network Rail said earlier that it had been. See BBC London report starting at 06:30
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002g68c

I’d be very concerned if I was travelling to Waterloo tomorrow. There is clearly still a major problem here that still hasn’t been fixed.

 
Looks like things are operating normally into Waterloo this morning which is good news. Let’s hope they really have found the fault this time and that it doesn’t happen again.