Passengers from Shropshire were left stranded at a Severn Valley Railway station after a fault forced a service to be abandoned.

More than 20 passengers were told they would be unable to complete their journey on the 2.15pm train from Bridgnorth to Kidderminster yesterday because of the problem. The passengers had paid £25 each for a three-course Sunday lunch dining service when the fault occurred.

They were at Bewdley when they had to abandon plans to continue the journey because of a fault in a tunnel on the line.

Carl Jones, from Ketley, Telford, who was on board with wife Rachel and mother Audrey, said: “We had been told there may be a bit of a delay at Bewdley, but it rapidly became clear that we weren’t going anywhere. After nearly half an hour, and with no guarantee that the service would ever continue to Kidderminster, we were told that there was a problem in the tunnel just down the line.

“Many of the passengers, including ourselves, got off, crossed the footbridge and waited for a service to take them back to Bridgnorth.”

David Mee, business services manager at Severn Valley Railway, said the delays had been caused by a fault in the tunnel between Bewdley and Kidderminster.

“The railway track has a small electrical current running through it, and in an environment like a tunnel where you can have extremes of hot and damp, it can go wrong,” he said.

“The system is designed to track the presence of a train in the tunnel, but the circuit showed there was a train there although we knew there wasn’t, so that meant we had to hold all the trains outside the tunnel until the operations people had decided on a special working arrangement.

“This involved putting a man on the footplate of the train to act as a baton between the trains, so whichever train he was on was the one which could go through the tunnel.

“The problem was fixed at 7pm last night and all the trains are running now.

“The passengers on the diner were delayed quite considerably. The people in the dining car were kept supplied with coffee after their finished their meal.”

By Pam Griffin