OREANDA-NEWS. Virgin Trains, London Midland, CrossCountry and Chiltern Railways are accepting each others' tickets to ease congestion at stations including London Euston, Coventry and Birmingham International.

More than 100 metres of overhead wires, which power electric trains, came down at 6.30am today. The cause is not yet confirmed.

A Network Rail spokesperson said: “Our engineers continue to work to fix this problem so we can get services back to normal.

“This is a big repair job which we expect to take until after 8pm this evening to complete.

“Until then we and our train company colleagues are doing our utmost to keep passengers on the move.”

Passengers have been inconvenienced throughout the day at the stations between and including Coventry and Birmingham International, and as far afield as Edinburgh, North Wales and Southampton.

With only half the normal number of Birmingham-bound trains currently running from Euston - three an hour instead of six - these services and the station itself will be busier than normal this evening.

To help keep people on the move, London Midland and Virgin customers are being urged to consider travelling from Marylebone to Birmingham Moor Street with Chiltern Railways.

London Midland also has cross-ticket acceptance with East Midland Trains for passengers south of Rugby, Warwickshire.

 

About Network Rail

Network Rail owns, manages and develops Britain's railway - the 20,000 miles of track, 40,000 bridges and viaducts, and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations (the largest of which we also run). In partnership with train operators we help people take more than 1.6bn journeys by rail every year - double the number of 1996 - and move hundreds of millions of tonnes of freight, saving almost 8m lorry journeys. We're investing ?40bn in the railway by 2019 through our Railway Upgrade Plan to deliver more frequent, more reliable, safer services and brighter and better stations.