Commuters faced more disruption on Monday morning’s First Capital Connect (FCC) rush hour service after damage from two construction drills that pierced through a tunnel near Old Street on Friday remained unresolved.
Services resumed on Monday until 7.45am when flooding on the tracks caused electrics and signals to fail once again on the busy route to Moorgate.
On Friday journeys were disrupted when the Northern City Line service between Finsbury Park and Moorgate was closed to investigate the incident.
Phil Verster, Network Rail route managing director, said on Friday: “Our engineers are on site assessing the damage and we will restore the railway as soon as possible but unfortunately the line will remain closed for the rest of the day.”
Last night FCC assured commuters online that repairs were complete and a normal service was expected to run from Monday. A spokesperson for FCC confirmed today that only 50 per cent of their service ran this morning.
There were delays of up to thirty minutes on the route between Finsbury Park and Moorgate. Many commuters started their week to find their trains had been diverted to King’s Cross station.
A season ticket holder travelling to Old Street this morning, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “It is unacceptable that they have still not sorted the problem which caused us so much disruption on Friday.
“They do not run a service between Moorgate and Finsbury Park at the weekend normally anyway so they had loads of time to repair the damage. It is just not good enough.”
FCC are now running a full service but delays are expected to last all day. Tonight engineers will resume pumping out water and mud. A spokesperson for FCC said that the disruption should be resolved by tomorrow morning.
In a survey of 7,500 commuters by customer rights’ group Which? this February, FCC was named the the nation’s least favourite train operating company in the country after only four out of 10 of those who took part in the study said they were satisfied with its service.
