Rail commuters at Liverpool’s Lime Street Station on Thursday wait for information on whether their service was affected by a technical fault at a signaling center that caused major disruption across the rail network. Photo by Adam Vaughan/EPA
Aug. 7 (UPI) — Rail passengers in England were facing a second day of delays and disruption Friday, a day after a 90-second power outage at a signaling control center in Manchester brought trains across the northwest, the Midlands, and as far away as Wales, to a standstill.
National Rail said trains were moving again but warned of ongoing disruption to services on the West Coast main line as well as East Midlands Railway, Northern, TransPennine Express and Transport for Wales through Friday afternoon, mainly due to trains and crews being out of position.
“This means that some trains are still expected to be affected this morning. Trains across the Greater Manchester area and northwest of England may still be canceled in full or revised to only run for part of their normal journey until service is able to fully recover,” said track operator Network Rail.
The company told passengers to check if any specific service was operating before heading to the station.
Northern Rail advised passengers to not to attempt to travel before 10 a.m. local time while TPE told its passengers to expect disruption until midday with delays and cancellations likely.
The network was thrown into chaos Thursday afternoon after power briefly went out at the Manchester Rail Operating Center and an emergency back-up supply failed to come online in time to prevent the entire signalling system going down.
The center was part of a major upgrade begun in 2014 phasing out track-side signal boxes in favor of state-of-the-art facilities from which train movements are controlled remotely.
Issuing an apology to passengers, Network Rail northwest director Chris Wright said that engineers had worked all night to bring signaling systems back online and get the railway moving again, saying most services were now operating.
“Of course we will be conducting a really thorough investigation to understand what went wrong and how we learn from this in the future. We need to learn from this. We must do better,” said Wright.
The incident sparked criticism that the failure was due to inadequate state funding of the railways and large-scale layoffs at Network Rail, which is responsible for the track, signaling and other infrastructure, at the start of 2026.
Figures for main-line services from the government’s Office of Road and Rail for the January to March quarter show nearly 81,000 train services, 3.2%, were either pulled or partially canceled and there were “severely disrupted days” when at least 5% of services were cancelled.
However, more than 86% of trains arrived at stations on their routes ahead of schedule, or within three minutes of the time stated on the timetable.
Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famed “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on August 28, 1963. The speech galvanized the nation’s civil rights movements and led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. File photo by UPI | License Photo
