Inquiry after railway failure

Monday 11th May 2009, 12:44PM BST.

An investigation has been launched after passengers were trapped on a train near Wellington for more than four hours.

The Arriva Trains Wales service from Aberystwyth to Birmingham broke down at 5.40pm, nine minutes after leaving Shrewsbury station on Saturday.

It caused chaos on the network by blocking the line and a London Midland service travelling behind it.

Economist Mike Haynes, who was returning to his Shifnal home from Shrewsbury on the London Midland train, said it took him four and a quarter hours to do the normally brief journey.

Read his comments here

He said: “After an hour they decided to link up the trains to push the Arriva train forward but that then caused the electrical brake failure to transfer to our train.

“They then could not uncouple the trains and they were stuck for about two hours. They had to close the line for the trains going the other way and freed them manually.

“We went back to Shrewsbury and were given a taxi to get home.”

Arriva Trains said today it was launching an investigation into the “serious failure”.

Spokeswoman Maggie Abbett said: “The incident happened at 17.40 and the train was declared a failure at 18.10. The passengers were moved on the 21.47 London Midland service.

“The incident lasted a long time and because of this we class this as very serious incident.”

View more: Arriva news, Shrewsbury news, Wellington news.