13 April 2018

Please note: this news article is in our archive. Articles were correct at time of publication, but should not be relied on for accuracy after the passage of time.

Following a complaint to MP Sir Nicholas Soames, as to the incredibly poor service (delays) on Wednesday 11^th April the following response was received from the Route Managing Director (South East) Network Rail.

Dear Sir Nicholas

I am emailing to offer my apologies to both you and your constituents following the disruption to services on the East Grinstead line over the last two evenings caused by a recurring points failure in the Hurst Green area. We repaired the piece of equipment in question yesterday but regrettably it has now failed again so I’m afraid further disruption is likely. We are urgently investigating the cause of this latest failure, but I wanted to provide an explanation of what has happened so far and what we have been doing to rectify this.

The points failure first occurred at 1730 on Monday evening, preventing trains running between East Grinstead and Oxted. Our response team arrived on site shortly afterwards and were able to get trains and passengers moving by making an adjustment to the equipment, with a full investigation into the root cause to be carried out following the end of service.

Engineers later identified damage to a piece of equipment within the machine that operates the points, which required a minimum of three hours’ work to rectify. By that point in the night, this would have affected the start of service on Tuesday morning – so the decision was taken to make further adjustments to the points to allow a normal service to operate on Tuesday, with a response team stationed on-site throughout the day. Engineers would then be able to return on Tuesday night, when they would have the full period of overnight access to carry out the repair.

Unfortunately the points did indeed fail again at 1615 on Tuesday afternoon – though disruption was minimised by the presence of our response team, who were able to make a further adjustment to the equipment which allowed the points to return to service at 1635. We were able to replace the damaged piece of equipment last night and our response team were on site this morning to monitor the operation of the points. As no further issues were reported this team was stood down after the morning peak, however the points failed again at lunchtime.

Please be assured we are urgently addressing this fault and I will update you when I know more. Once again, please accept my apologies for this disruption, this is not the standard of service that passengers deserve.

John Halsall

Network Rail