First Hull Trains has issued a statement to its customers who were affected by the major delays on Friday 15 April which then overran into Saturday.
The statement, from MD Cath Bellamy, says:
“Unfortunately, due to two unrelated incidents on Friday 15 April, we were only able to run around half of our services and this resulted in a huge amount of disruption for many people who travelled with us. We apologise unreservedly if you were caught up in our problems.
“A terrible fatality on the East Coast Main Line earlier in the day was later compounded by a catastrophic signalling problem between Retford and Newark – delaying or cancelling many services on the route between Edinburgh and London King’s Cross.
A man was killed on Lindells level crossing, near Sandy in Bedfordshire, when he was hit by the East Coast inter-city from Kings Cross on Friday afternoon.
“Disruption to journeys is extremely frustrating, however, safety is a top priority for us and the wider industry so running trains in these circumstances was extremely difficult I’m afraid.
“Whilst both matters were out of our direct control, and despite Network Rail’s attempts to sort the issues out quickly, the impact on our services yesterday was considerable and today is proving equally challenging.
“We started Saturday with several trains out of sequence due to a number of them being stuck on different parts of the route. Also, many of our staff worked very long hours looking after our customers whose trains were either caught up in the problems or cancelled as a consequence.”
