GA's Apology for Service Disruption on 7th August (in case GA delete it)

Just so people get to read it before it gets deleted from Greater Anglia's website on the following link:
http://www.abelliogreateranglia.co.uk/about-us/news/2014/08/apology-for-service-disruption-thursday-7-august

We are sorry for the disruption affecting train services on the Great Eastern Main Line yesterday evening, which caused significant problems for passengers travelling to and from destinations north of Colchester, as well as for journeys between Ipswich and Cambridge/Peterborough. The cause of the delays was a major fault affecting a signalling cable south of Stowmarket, which resulted in a complete failure of the signalling system between Ipswich and Stowmarket. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that it proved very difficult to identify the exact location of the fault and because it took longer than anticipated to put in alternative safe signalling and operating arrangements, to allow trains to run through the affected area. In addition, to minimise the overall delays and run the best possible service, when platform capacity was severely limited at Ipswich as a result of the problems, it was necessary for some services to be altered at short notice and for some trains to turn around at Colchester.

We provided as many buses as we could, as quickly as we could, to provide alternative transport between Ipswich and Stowmarket and we then started to run trains through as soon as it was safe to do so, but there were still severe delays affecting many people. For anyone wishing to claim compensation, details of our delay repay policy can be found on the Abellio Greater Anglia website :http://www.abelliogreateranglia.co.uk/about-us/our-performance/delay-repay.

We are implementing three actions to try and prevent a repetition and handle any future incidents more effectively :

• Identifying the underlying cause of the cable fault and then taking action to prevent future failures

• Reviewing our response arrangements to get staff to site more quickly to implement alternative operating procedures

• Reviewing the communication of the contingency arrangements to better explain service alterations and the reasons for them

We apologise again to our customers for the inconvenience and frustration caused by yesterday's problems.

Jamie Burles                               Richard Schofield

Managing Director                      Managing Director

Abellio Greater Anglia                Network Rail Anglia