South Western Railway (SWR) is advising passengers to travel between Basingstoke and Woking only if absolutely necessary this week, with a major landslip just one of 11 incidents that has affected infrastructure on its routes.
The firm said the landslip that occurred near Hook on Sunday is severely reducing the number of trains that can safely run on the line and that repairs are ‘set to take at least a week to complete’.
All services to London Waterloo from Exeter, Salisbury, Weymouth, Bournemouth, Southampton, and Winchester will terminate at Basingstoke, where ‘an extremely limited shuttle service’ will connect with trains at Woking.
Image courtesy of SWR
SWR said it will work with Network Rail to add to this timetable if at all possible in the coming days, but was urging passengers to continue checking before they travel, ‘given the scale and complexity of the infrastructure works at Hook’.
Among 10 other incidents that affected infrastructure on SWR’s routes overnight on Sunday and into Monday was major flooding in the Sway area.
SWR said a further ‘severe’ landslip occurred in Addlestone, on the line between Virginia Water and Weybridge, which meant that trains were unable to run on Monday.
Managing director Claire Mann said: ‘We are deeply sorry for the significant disruption felt by customers across our network on Monday. What began as a major landslip at Hook was then compounded by 10 separate weather-related infrastructure failures, which have made planning and delivering a reliable train service across our network very difficult.
‘We are working hard to provide a service that our customers can rely upon and unfortunately, we will be unable to run through services from Exeter, Weymouth, or Portsmouth (via Eastleigh) to London Waterloo from Tuesday.’
Flooding also disrupted Great Western Railway services in the West of England last week.
In 2020 the Office of Rail and Road said more needed to be done to tackle the impacts of climate change on the railway and that Network Rail’s plans to increase resilience were not keeping up with severe weather events.
Last week, when asked during a session of the Transport Select Committee whether strikes were creating uncertainty for passengers, RMT union leader Mick Lynch said rail services were ‘absolutely useless as well when we are not on strike’.
Transport Network has approached Network Rail for comment.
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