21 March 2025 • 5 min read
Pictured above: An example of clipping points on railway track.
We are very sorry for the disruption our customers experienced yesterday afternoon and evening.
What happened?
At approximately 14:40 yesterday, a signalling fault was reported in the Southend area. As a result of this failure, services from Southend East to Chalkwell in both directions were suspended. This severely restricted the number of trains we could operate.
Upon confirmation of the signalling failure, arrangements were made for c2c tickets to be accepted on Greater Anglia services and First Buses between Leigh-on-Sea and Shoeburyness.
Network Rail dispatched a team of engineers to the area who had to manually install heavy clips to eight sets of track points, which were repaired at approximately 17:30. However, the fault caused knock-on delays and cancellations to our services, which continued into the evening.
Unfortunately, at 21:30, a driver reported having hit an obstruction in the West Horndon area. This meant we had to suspend trains in both directions to allow specialist train crew and the emergency services to inspect the site.
On inspection, it was discovered the train had hit an animal and the line was opened at 23:00. Again, this caused knock-on delays and cancellations to our services.
Rob Mullen, Managing Director of c2c, said: “I am sorry to our customers who were caught up in the disruption on our route during yesterday’s evening peak.
“We know this will have caused extensive delays to your journeys especially as it happened at the worst possible time during the evening peak. We worked closely with our Network Rail colleagues to try and get our services up and running as quickly as possible, but we know this will have impacted many of your journeys last night.”
Katie Frost, Network Rail Anglia’s Route Director said: “I’m really sorry to all the passengers who were affected by the disruption yesterday. We had a very rare failure of several signalling modules, which meant we couldn’t run trains.
“While we had our response teams on site quickly, for us to be able to get trains running again safely, we needed to manually install heavy clips to eight sets of track points, which took around three hours.
“I have launched an immediate investigation with our signalling equipment supplier to understand what went wrong and prevent this from happening again. Once again, I’m sorry to everyone involved.”
Compensation for delays
If you have been delayed, you will be eligible for compensation for your journey. Find out more about the compensation we offer, and how to claim, here.
c2c smartcard users: You will receive automatic compensation provided you tapped your Smartcard at both the start and end of your journey. If you have not been able to do so, you will have to make a manual claim for your delay. This is because our system will not have full information about your journey, so cannot calculate your automatic compensation. We recommend you check your online account to ensure our automatic payments do reflect your actual delay. If you feel they do not, you can use your online account to correct the automatic system or alternatively submit a manual claim.
Paper ticket holders, Oyster and contactless card users: Please fill out your details on this online delay repay form.
Contactless customers: Customers who travelled this morning from a c2c station using pay as you with contactless ticketing can claim delay repay by providing the full details of their affected journey. You can access your journey history and statement from the Transport for London website by following these steps:
- Go to the contactless page on the TfL website and then click on 7 day contactless journey and payment history tab.
- When prompted enter your personal information (name, address and email) and details of the contactless card used for the delayed journey.
- Once the payment card has been located, the site will display a list of all journeys and payments made within the last 7 days.
- At the bottom of the page there is a button where you can ‘download statement’.
- This statement should be attached to your Delay Repay Claim.