Rail passengers have to walk along tracks on hottest day of year so far after fault brings trains to halt
Scores of train passengers have been evacuated after some services were halted on what was the hottest day of the year in the UK so far.
Video footage showed people, including young children, getting off a train near Loughborough Junction in south London and walking along the tracks with their luggage.
Passenger Ioannis Dimitrousis, who filmed the incident, said he was travelling to Brighton when his train stopped.
He said people were "locked in the train with no fresh air and no air conditioning".
He said: "We were just going to Brighton but still messed up our day."
He added that the train also had "lots of people" who were heading to Gatwick Airport who missed their flights.
Another passenger wrote on X to Thameslink: "You will have hell to pay. We've been stuck on this hot and humid train for over an hour.
"The doors were closed because we were told we may be moving. That was 15 minutes ago. It's like an oven in here and we're being slow-cooked."
She said the train was "stuck between Blackfriars and East Croydon" in south London.
A Thameslink spokesperson replied to her, saying: "This train will be getting evacuated shortly. Please wait until response staff have boarded and set up a safe evacuation route."
Govia Thameslink Railway and Network Rail have apologised for the delays.
A spokesperson said: "Earlier today, a fault on a train near Loughborough Junction brought all services to a halt in the area, three of them outside station platforms.
"Without power and air conditioning on such a hot day, we pulled all resources from across Sussex and Kent to get personnel on site to safely evacuate passengers as quickly as possible along the track.
"This would have been a difficult and uncomfortable experience for our passengers and we are truly sorry.
"With safety our top priority, the safest place was to remain on the trains while we worked our hardest to get help to those on board."
The spokesperson said due to engineering works, the route affected was the only one that Thameslink trains can take south out of London.
And the disruption was expected to continue into the evening.
The spokesperson continued: "Passengers delayed by 15 minutes or more are also entitled to compensation, with details on our website."
It comes as the UK recorded the hottest day of the year so far, with a high of 33.2C (91.7F) in Charlwood, Surrey, according to the Met Office.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
18 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Revealed: What really happened at the 'Wimbledon Incident' when Meghan Markle asked people not to take photos
Next week, thousands of lucky spectators will travel to London for the oldest tennis championship in the world – with tens of millions watching on TV. For many, Wimbledon marks the beginning of summer – helped by a steady flow of Pimm's cocktails.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Would you spend £6 on a croissant? (Gen Z does)
Gen Z: Fancy a croissant for breakfast? Boomer: Go on, then. There's a Tesco Finest pack in the bread bin. Be real. I'm nipping to Baaria on Charing Cross Road to buy them fresh. Nipping? It's a 15km round trip. I'll run there, grab two of the £5.45 pistachio croissants and be back in no time. Are they made by a Michelin-starred chef? Baaria was recommended by influencer Emma Pudge in one of her 'Bun Run' series. To me, 'Bun Run' means nipping to the corner shop in my dressing gown. It's where Pudge shares a running route with her 23,000 Instagram followers, which ends at a specific must-try bakery. Does jogging 100 yards down the road and getting a Greggs jam doughnut count? Greggs? Please! That's for Boomers and builders. I'm not sure someone with 'digital vibe curator' on their CV is qualified to make vocation-based judgments. I've told you, a brand's social-media aura matters. Anyway, even The Telegraph says hipster bakeries are the new Gen Z hotspots. Where you eat your pastry barefoot in a shared community space while a man with a nose ring plays the bongos? [Eyeroll] The coolest ones are on The Good Food Guide's list of Britain's 50 best bakeries, which has become a bible for pastry lovers. All 50 must be in East London – the only place pretentious enough for someone to spend a tenner on an 'artisan' eclair. They're actually as far flung as Glasgow. The Guardian says it's creating a whole new travel trend called 'bakery tourism'. In my day, bakery tourism meant strolling down the bread aisle in the Co-op. One Gen Zer told the paper he'd completed a 14-day trek and two ferry hops to reach The Bakehouse in remote Mallaig on the west coast of Scotland. What's on the menu: a cream slice infused with haggis and Irn-Bru? That's actually xenophobic. The fishing village is famous for its hazelnut praline pain suisse. Sounds weirdly French. Anyway, what happened to your generation being skint? According to trade mag British Baker, 80 per cent of us Gen Zers believe a daily sweet treat is important for mental health. More essential than, say, a roof over their heads or a healthy savings account? 'I am held hostage by my need for a daily sweet treat,' one wrote on X. Another said: 'A mid-afternoon sweet treat might actually save my life.' So now we're supposed to be prescribing viennoiseries to you lot on the NHS? It's called self-care. You wouldn't get it. It's exactly how I feel about my 4pm Hobnob and cuppa. It just doesn't cost £8 or require a ten-mile trek across London. Bloomsbury's Fortitude Bakehouse is only down the road, with its delish £4.50 pistachio choux buns. Apparently, there's a 90-minute queue outside after Parkrun on Saturday morning. It's very popular with tourists. It's a cult with icing sugar! A cake and a latte there costs nearly a tenner. It's even pricier if you drink oat milk. What's the point of ordering oat milk when the pastries have enough dairy to milk an entire farm dry? It's eco-friendly, duh. Just like the fuel burned during that 180-mile pilgrimage to the bakery in outer Scotland. Influencer Toby Inskip, better known as Eating With Tod, told his 1.9 million Instagram followers Fortitude's £4.50 nutty crème bun has 'custody of my soul'. Sounds nutty himself. Either that or the bakery has paid him. He'd have to tag his post as an ad.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
One Day author DAVID NICHOLLS on whether he'll ever write a sequel
When David Nicholls' editor read the first draft of his latest novel You Are Here, one of his notes was, 'I think there's probably three days too much walking in this.' It was maybe inevitable feedback. The book – published in paperback on Thursday – is about two strangers, Michael (42) and Marnie (39), who walk together along the Coast to Coast, a 192-mile stretch from St Bee's Head in Cumbria to Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire. That's a lot of trudging, and Nicholls' editor is 'not a great walker'. So some changes were made, removing the 'geography teacher sort of details'. (Nicholls concedes that 'not everyone is as interested in the switch from granite to limestone as I am'.) The result is a novel that is funny and clever, with the perfect amount of walking. Nicholls, 58, is a big walker. He has done 'bits' of the Coast to Coast, but says that, actually, it's not his favourite route. ('There are nicer ways to cross the Dales. I love the Dales High Way, for instance.') The most miles he's done in a day is 30 – after a march across the North York Moors. His step count can sometimes reach 45,000 and, on average, he moves at a 'steady' pace of three miles per hour. He has kit, too: a compass he was given by that walking-sceptic editor ('I hardly ever use it, but I have it!'); a pair of 'proper Italian boots that I really love'; a handheld navigational tool to download routes in advance; and a paper map. He also has walking-related apps, including AllTrails and Outdooractive, but prefers to bury his phone right at the bottom of his rucksack and not look at it. The editor who bought Nicholls the compass also got him a waterproof notebook, which he keeps in his pocket. 'I always think I'm going to sit on a mountaintop and compose something wonderful. No, it all happens when I come back – at my desk, warm and dry.' Nicholls grew up in Eastleigh, Hampshire, the middle child of three. His father was a maintenance engineer in a cake factory, his mother worked for the council, and nobody did much walking. As a teenager Nicholls began going 'for long, soulful walks along the Water Meadows in Winchester'. (He was, he says, 'a pretentious 18-year-old'.) He has a son and a daughter with his partner of more than 20 years, Hannah Weaver, and they have attempted various family walking holidays. 'We had a couple of very, very, very wet trips to the Yorkshire Dales.' But the proper, solitary, 45,000-steps-a-day sort of walking began 11 years ago, after his father died. 'I just felt I needed to go away and spend some time by myself,' Nicholls says, 'and my family were very understanding.' He had always liked the look of the stretch of Northumbrian coast that you see from the train window if you're travelling from London to Edinburgh. So, he went there. 'I wasn't expecting any kind of miracles to happen,' he says, 'but I just wanted some time.' He walked for four days, ten hours a day, alone. 'It was the longest time I'd been by myself in ten years.' There were no miracles, but he loved it and has been 'ticking off' routes since. (He thinks he's done 15 in a decade.) Because he doesn't like being away from home for too long, his walking is in England and he favours the North. His attitude is 'fair weather: I don't camp. I never do anything that's really, seriously in the wilderness. Often, I can hear an A-road. I've never been inclined to…' a dark pause, '…mountaineer.' But there are physical benefits to these trudges. 'I've always hated all sport. If anyone kicks a ball towards me, I immediately panic. Walking is the nearest I get to a physical activity that I actually enjoy.' Nicholls is also an insomniac, and walking 'is the thing that's guaranteed to make me sleep all the way through'. Sometimes he walks with his partner and he mentions a recent father-and-son walking trip to the Three Peaks in Yorkshire, but mostly Nicholls walks alone. The balance between solitude and loneliness is a lot of what You Are Here is about. Nicholls is preoccupied with it himself. 'I live with my family, but I guess I felt that after Covid I'd found ways to enjoy time by myself, so much so that I sort of stopped seeing my friends and became a bit nervous about going out for dinner and catching up. I had to give myself a bit of a talking-to,' he says. 'I had to decide to make an effort. 'In your teens and 20s, you really want to know everyone and meet everyone and talk and share and listen to stories. And I think that dwindles as you get older – it becomes much harder to rediscover that pleasure. So I guess the book is about two people who have found a way to make [loneliness] work, but who are then reminded of the value of connection.' Nicholls edited You Are Here in 2023, as the Netflix adaptation of his novel One Day was being made. (He wrote the penultimate episode and was an executive producer.) 'In the day they were filming Dexter clubbing in Brixton in 1993, and in the evenings I was editing this book about walking the Coast to Coast path in middle age. But Michael and Marnie are the same age as Emma and Dexter are by the end of One Day, so there's a kind of continuity to it.' Nicholls has written six novels (his fourth, Us, was longlisted for the Booker Prize) but One Day is what he's best known for. He's not grumbling. The book has sold more than six million copies and that success is 'thrilling'. And, 'if writers often get a bit grumpy about film adaptations [of their novels]', he won't bother with that either. In 2011, One Day was turned into a film he wrote the screenplay for, and last year there was the Netflix behemoth. 'I was offered two lines in the final episode. A man walks into Dexter's café and says, 'This used to be a fish shop.' They said, 'Why don't you do a little Hitchcock cameo?' I firmly turned them down. Honestly, they would have had to use CGI.' (Nicholls worked as an actor in his 20s and says he was no good – 'I could really only play clerks and servants' – but also understudied for a main part in The Seagull at the National Theatre with Judi Dench, so he can't have been bad.) One Day's concept came from a moment in Tess Of The D'Urbervilles when Tess considers – and don't read this if you somehow don't know the end of One Day – her 'death date', or, as she thinks about it: 'a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there'. So when I ask if there was ever a version where Emma didn't – look away! – die, he replies: 'Nope! It was about the one day that is your death day. That was always the idea.' Would he write another storyline that sad? 'You know, I think One Day is probably a younger man's book. It was always meant to have a big, lush, kind-of operatic ending. I'm probably writing in a slightly more restrained way now. I still love big, emotional books, but when I think of that story, I see it as the work of a younger writer. Not in a bad way, in a way that probably I'm a bit too self-conscious to recreate.' He adds, decisively: 'I know that I'll never write a sequel.' (Sorry, Netflix.) Still, 'getting older, I'm sure mortality is a subject that could come up again'. After our interview, I email Nicholls to ask if he ever thinks about his own 'death day'. He replies: 'Yes, I'm afraid I do think about it a lot. In my 30s, even into my 40s, it barely crossed my mind but now I'm reminded of mortality every time I glance in a mirror. I find myself thinking, how many more summer holidays? How many more books will I be able to read? My only response is to be enraged with myself about wasted time, scrolling on the internet when I could be working or reading or speaking to friends. I have to get on with things now.' He adds: 'All of which makes me great fun to live with, I'm sure.' Nicholls turns 60 next year, so I ask what he is going to do to celebrate. 'Well,' he says, 'I'll probably go for a walk.'
