Serious disruption to Britain’s rail network continued on Wednesday as engineers worked to deal with the effects of an unprecedented heatwave, while Network Rail announced a new “resilience taskforce” to plan for future extreme weather.
Services were expected to return to normal later in the day, after two days of general speed restrictions and mainline closures, but damage, including downed overhead cables and fires that spread along the tracks, was still halting many services on Wednesday morning .
The East Coast Main Line remained closed between London and Peterborough after a fire on Tuesday evening, suspending LNER services from King’s Cross and Thameslink and Great Northern services north of the capital.
Train services around Birmingham New Street were severely disrupted due to extensive damage to overhead power lines, with Avanti West Coast and West Midlands trains forced to divert to alternative routes.
A number of services from London Euston were canceled and others delayed after fires in north-west London on Tuesday.
Fewer East Midlands intercity services were running as repairs continued on the Midlands Main Line. The damage is also affecting some Northern, Transpennine, Cross-Country services and transport to Wales.
National Rail’s official industry website told customers to check before traveling and continued to urge people to only travel if necessary, despite the huge amount of work done overnight.
“Network Rail crews continue to work tirelessly to carry out the repairs so that we can restore passenger services, but there are still disruptions to services throughout the day,” it said.
Meanwhile, Network Rail has announced the launch of an independent taskforce to determine how the railway can be made more resilient to hot weather.
The task force will look at how other railways around the world deal with extreme heat and temperature swings and will consider issues such as the changing climate, how infrastructure can be kept running safely and how best to manage operations and care for passengers in future heatwaves waves.
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Andrew Haynes, chief executive of Network Rail, said: “The weather we’ve experienced this week has put enormous pressure on our infrastructure, our staff and our passengers, and extreme weather events are becoming more common as the climate continues to change , we need to pull out all the stops to make our railway as sustainable as possible.
The four experts on the panel are former Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo; former HS2 chairman Doug Oakervey; former chief executive of Australian rail operators, Simon Lane, who ran trains in hot climates; and chief executive of watchdog Transport Focus, Anthony Smith.
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