Third Rail Damage at Ashtead

[infobleep]

There are electrical supply issues around Ashtead, which is affecting services heading towards London this morning.

The South West Trains Bookham services were being diverted via Cobham. However there was a couple of interesting variations.

The 6.58 is shown to be stopping at Cobham line stations but as has no report against them.

The 7.58, which is the next South West Trains service to go via Bookham usually, was shown as simply skipping all the stations between Effingham Junction and Raynes Park but was changed to be an all stations stopper to Surbiton.

Now I was on the 8.03 behind which ran more empty than usual. Does anyone know why they would have felt the need to stop the 7.58 at the stations it doesn't usually stop at? It was only 5 minutes head of the train that usually stops there. Would it be to slow it down so it didn't reach Raynes Park early? If leaves are an issue yet, that would also slow it down.

By actually stopping there it allowed passengers a shorter trip to Wimbledon, Earlsfield, Clapham Junction and Vauxhall as the 8.03 skips those and uses the fast line to Waterloo.

It ran late from Cobham onwards and was in affect running in our path by then.

As an aside, I'd love to know how the National Rail Enquiries App decides which order to show stations in when showing cancelled stations and additional stations added in. I think it may be based on distance to each station. The National Rail Enquiries Web Site is the same.

 

[Deepgreen]

Does anyone have any information on this? Thanks.

 

[zoneking]

I waited for 1 hour 20 minutes for a train south from Epsom, leaving at 0920. I'm not sure which side the damage is. saw no trains from Leatherhead.

 

[Bald Rick]

Third rail is off the insulators. Quite a stretch of it.

It's is roughly the equivalent of the wires down for the OLE. Happens quite often.

 

[Deepgreen]

Third rail is off the insulators. Quite a stretch of it.

It's is roughly the equivalent of the wires down for the OLE. Happens quite often.

Suspected it might be that, but was interested in how/why. Looking at RTT, possibly an over-powerful/mis-aligned 'leaf buster' (3S85), noting that nothing passed after it did, but an up train did beforehand? Looks like the first train past was 1D34 Leatherhead to Waterloo at 1250.

 

[TEW]

2D06, 0458 Guildford-London Waterloo reported losing shoe gear in the area, that would have been the first train through of the day. I believe the train was then stuck at Epsom for some time.

 

[tsr]

2D06, 0458 Guildford-London Waterloo reported losing shoe gear in the area, that would have been the first train through of the day. I believe the train was then stuck at Epsom for some time.

2D06 did indeed lose shoes though it was moved to the carriage sidings at Epsom within the hour. After that it was really a job of trying to keep the Down line open and getting sufficient staff and resources to check the infrastructure and work what needed to be done to fix it. Apparently the longer delay occurred with finding the extent of the damage and assessing it. It certainly wasn't a small amount of damage either, as Bald Rick has said.

Rail replacement buses started to arrive before the morning peak and a shuttle train service was run between Dorking and Horsham as well. Local buses / GWR etc. all had ticket acceptance. Still quite a nuisance but at least SWT can divert some trains via the Cobham Line and, as for Southern services, at least it was on a bit of the Portsmouth Lines between crossovers which could actually be useful in the circumstances (trying to work round an incident in some other locations on that route can be much more of a nightmare).

I've not heard about a railhead treatment train being anything to do with it, but I'll keep an open mind on that one.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

I assume this disruption explains the 455 that was doing a wrong road movement on the Hook Road bridge just north of Epsom station at 09.05 this morning? Running into Epsom on the up line? Presumably being shunted into platform 4 - which would also imply that the loss of power included the normal reversing sidings just to the south of the station?