A Gloucester Road fault left three Tube lines with severe delays on Friday morning, after signalling and points failures at the station disrupted the Circle and District lines and a separate track fault at Brixton added to the problems on the Victoria line.
Minor delays were still lingering on the District line as of 09:24 BST, affecting the stretch around Earl’s Court, according to Transport for London’s latest status update. Minor delays on the Central line were still in place as of 09:43 BST because of train cancellations. The Circle line has since fully recovered from the earlier Gloucester Road points failure and was running smoothly again as of 08:59 BST. The problems were first reported early on Friday 2 October, and the disruption was still in place as the capital moved towards the morning peak.
Gloucester Road, in Kensington, is one of the key junctions on the western side of the Circle and District routes. The two lines share tracks through the station and onwards through South Kensington, Sloane Square and Victoria towards Embankment and the City, which is why a single failure at this point can quickly affect services in both directions, and on both lines at once.
The station is also served by the Piccadilly line, from platforms below the Circle and District platforms. The Piccadilly line was not among the lines listed as severely delayed this morning, although passengers changing between lines at Gloucester Road still faced a difficult interchange, and anyone using the station was advised to check the status of their whole journey before setting out.
Tickets were being accepted on London Buses on affected routes, giving passengers on the badly delayed Circle and District lines an alternative for at least part of their journey. TfL advised everyone travelling to check before they travel, a warning that applied well beyond Kensington, because delays on the shared Circle and District tracks can spread to stations right across central London.
The problems at Gloucester Road were not the only difficulty on the network this morning. The Victoria line also had severe delays because of a track fault at Brixton, while the Central line, the Northern line and the Weaver line were running with minor delays. It meant three lines were severely affected at the same time, on a morning when many passengers would have been looking for exactly those alternative routes to escape the trouble in Kensington. The Brixton problem also continued a difficult week on that route, after a fault at Brixton caused severe Victoria line delays earlier this week.
A signalling fault near London Liverpool Street was also causing delays on the London Overground. National Rail said disruption from that fault was expected until 10:00, adding to a difficult morning for passengers heading into the City.
A points failure is one of the more disruptive faults a station area can suffer. Points are the movable sections of track that allow a train to move from one line to another, and at a junction station such as Gloucester Road they are in constant use as Circle and District services are routed through. When the points, or the signalling that controls them, fail, trains cannot be moved across the junction safely. Controllers are left with little choice but to stop services short of the affected area, turn trains back at other stations, or hold them in platforms until a safe route can be set, which is how delays build so quickly even some distance from the fault itself.
For passengers who needed to keep moving, the best alternative depended on where the journey started. The Piccadilly line at Gloucester Road itself, and at nearby South Kensington and Earl’s Court, offered a way into the West End and across to King’s Cross that avoided the affected Circle and District platforms altogether, as long as services there continued to run normally. South Kensington is a short walk from Gloucester Road, and is the station where TfL has chosen Costain to deliver a step-free upgrade. Passengers heading for Victoria, Westminster or the City, who would normally stay on a District line train, could use buses from the Gloucester Road area instead, with their tickets being accepted, or walk to High Street Kensington for District line trains on the Edgware Road branch, although those services do not call at Victoria. Another option was the Piccadilly line to Hammersmith, where District line services towards Richmond and Ealing Broadway also call.
It was the latest in a run of difficult starts on the Tube, following a morning of rush-hour chaos when the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines were part-suspended. As on that occasion, the advice for anyone who had not yet set out was to allow considerably more time than usual, to travel later in the morning if they possibly could, and to expect platforms, trains and buses to be busier than normal while the fault was dealt with.
This is a developing story, and the position can change quickly once the faulty equipment is dealt with. No time was given in this morning’s updates for the delays on the three affected lines to ease, and passengers should expect the disruption to continue until TfL says otherwise. London Streets will update this report as the status of the lines changes.
We are now closing this live coverage: severe delays have cleared across the affected lines, with only the ongoing Victoria line issues near Brixton remaining, which we are covering separately elsewhere on this site.
