TRAIN services to London Victoria are still disrupted this morning after a power supply failure at Streatham Hill affected signalling on the Brighton Main Line on Wednesday night.

Network Rail has revealed that backup systems failed after the original fault had occurred. Engineers have now repaired the system but many trains and crews were left out of position, which meant normal services were not expected to be restored until after the morning peak.

The problems affected Southern, Thameslink and Gatwick Express, and the delays on Thameslink were aggravated yesterday by an unrelated overhead line fault between Luton and Bedford.

Chris Denham of Network Rail described the successive failures of the back up systems after the fault at Streatham as ‘most unusual’, and said an investigation is under way.

John Halsall, Network Rail’s managing director for the South East route, said: “I would like to offer a sincere apology to everyone who has had their journey disrupted today. Our job is to provide a reliable railway for train operators and the travelling public and today it’s clear we’ve failed in that task.

“We’ve now been able to restore signalling and trains are beginning to run again to and from London Victoria,”

Govia Thameslink Railway’s chief operating officer Nick Brown added: “We are working hard with our colleagues at Network Rail following a major power failure at Streatham. We apologise to our passengers caught up in the disruption to services. Tickets are being accepted on alternative routes. We encourage any passengers delayed by 15 minutes or more to claim Delay Repay compensation via our websites.”