A mystery power outage brought large parts of London’s public transport network to a halt today amid continued fears over the vulnerability of UK supplies.
Four Underground lines and the Elizabeth line were suspended while 20 stations were shut after the incident in South West London ahead of the afternoon rush hour.
While the cause of the outage remains a mystery, it comes amid concerns over power supplies in Britain and whether Russian agents could sabotage the network.
A substation serving Heathrow Airport caught fire on March 21, forcing it to close to all flights for many hours and disrupting more than 270,000 air passenger journeys.
Then a major blackout on April 28 in Spain and Portugal saw train passengers stranded and millions of people left without phone and internet access.
Just one day later another substation fire in the Maida Vale area of West London saw around 80 people evacuated from their homes on April 29.
Today, no trains were running on the entire Bakerloo line, while the Jubilee line was axed between London Bridge and Finchley Road with severe delays on the rest of it.
Signage on an information board at High Street Kensington station in West London today
The Northern line was part-suspended between Stockwell and Morden and between Euston and Kennington, and there was no service on the Waterloo & City line.
Meanwhile the Elizabeth line was part-suspended in the central section between Paddington and Abbey Wood, with severe delays on the rest of the line.
National Rail said services across the Elizabeth line may be cancelled, delayed by up to 50 minutes or revised until 5.30pm.
Separately, the Suffragette line on the Overground was completely suspended due to a fire alert.
Some 20 stations were closed or partially-closed across the network due to the power outage, including key interchanges such as Paddington, Liverpool Street and Tottenham Court Road.
Other impacted stops were Baker Street, Charing Cross, Bond Street, Westminster, Embankment, Euston, London Bridge and Farringdon.
Woolwich, Whitechapel, Waterloo, Swiss Cottage, South Kensington, Putney Bridge, Abbey Wood, Canary Wharf and Custom House were also closed or partially closed.
The issue was caused by a power outage in South West London at about 2.30pm which has since been rectified but delays are ongoing, according to BBC News.
The Transport for London (TfL) website was struggling to handle traffic this afternoon and began to crash from about 3.15pm.
A spokesman for TfL told the PA news agency that there was an outage in South West London for ‘a matter of minutes’ and ‘everything shut down’ due to a ‘National Grid issue’.
He went on: ‘When the power goes out the trains will have stopped, obviously, there’s emergency power on trains and stations so everything wouldn’t have gone completely black, if you were on there, but the trains would have stopped and we would have cleared some stations because there’s no electricity it might not necessarily be safe for them to be open … some people would have probably been stuck in a tunnel for a little bit of time.’
TfL is in the process of ‘getting things back up and running again’
