Travel chaos strikes London commuters
Morning Star: 17 January 2012
Thousands of rail passengers suffered travel chaos today after stolen cables and a cracked rail led to huge disruption on some of the country's busiest routes.
Services into London's Waterloo station - used by around 250,000 passengers a day - were heavily delayed by the two early-morning incidents.
A cable theft in the Basingstoke area knocked out controls. Engineers rushed to make repairs which they completed shortly after 7am.
A hairline crack was spotted in the rails near Vauxall - just outside Waterloo - in the early hours of the morning.
The damage caused the line to be shut all day as due to the heavy use of nearby track repairs could not be carried out until this evening, a Network Rail spokesman explained.