Trivia: longest delay?

[enginedin]

I'm sure this has probably been asked before at some point, but I can't find any any recent posts...

The incident on Thursday night which caused a London - Edinburgh service to be 7 hours 59 minutes late made me wonder if this is the longest ever delay to a passenger service? Any other contenders that people can remember?

 

[A S Leib]

I think Eurostar's had some very long ones but the longest mention I can find quickly is around six hours last December.

 

[hexagon789]

I'm sure this has probably been asked before at some point, but I can't find any any recent posts...

The incident on Thursday night which caused a London - Edinburgh service to be 7 hours 59 minutes late made me wonder if this is the longest ever delay to a passenger service? Any other contenders that people can remember?

Definitely some 11+ hours delays to cross-border services about 10 years ago. I can't remember specifics, sorry.

Going much further back, trains stuck in snowdrifts for 3 days+ in some parts of Scotland...

 

[P156KWJ]

Similar sort of delays have happened before, as some people affected by the aftermath of farce in the wake of the Hatfield crash in 2000 will tell you

 

[Zomboid]

8 hours late is quite punctual by the standards of Via rail trains 1 & 2...

 

[Peter0124]

I think there was a 600 minute delay on some long distance service a while ago. May have been LNER.

Also for freight Im pretty sure there was a 1100 minute one (18 hours!)

 

[3141]

I think Eurostar's had some very long ones but the longest mention I can find quickly is around six hours last December.

There were very long delays on Eurostar about 15 years ago, maybe more, when trains broke down inside the Channel Tunnel. The cause was snow accumulating within the pantograph wells which melted in the warmer atmosphere in the tunnel., and dripped down through fixings to where it shorted electrical connections. The cause not being appreciated, after the first breakdown they ran a second train wrong line to get past the first with the intention of switching it at one of the crossovers. When that broke down both lines were blocked. The event became notorious because the Shuttles either had no toilets or they stopped working as well, and passengers had to turn a section of the train into a makeshift toilet. They used diesels to haul out one train but for some reason could not detach them at Folkestone or Ashford, and the train continued to St. Pancras where the diesels were trapped against the buffers and weren't available to rescue anything else.

 

[Brent Goose]

14 hours for a Weymouth bound train

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-43253130

Passengers were stuck for up to 14 hours when at least three trains ground to a halt as freezing conditions hit lines in the New Forest in Hampshire. But what is it like to be one of the unlucky few, spending the night in a cold carriage full of strangers with no way out?

Robert Luther was among about 100 passengers on a five-carriage train which left London Waterloo bound for Weymouth early on Thursday evening.

 

[Dr Hoo]

I think there was a 600 minute delay on some long distance service a while ago. May have been LNER.

Also for freight Im pretty sure there was a 1100 minute one (18 hours!)

Back in the 1970s, when I started working on Merseyside, BR had the chance to run a trial (freight) train of white spirit. The day arrived but the special schedule was cancelled - no crew. Tried again the next day as Control special. No luck. And the next day, and the next... Finally ran on the seventh day, having been ‘cancelled’ five times.

Not strictly a ‘delay’ I suppose.

For some unfathomable reason good ol’ BR didn’t win the traffic from road.

 

[xotGD]

I recall during one period of severe winter weather The Clansman rolled into Euston almost exactly 24 hours late.

 

[furnessvale]

I presume the weekly Stockport to Stalybridge train has been cancelled on at least one occasion. If I am correct a week must surely take the record.

 

[hexagon789]

I presume the weekly Stockport to Stalybridge train has been cancelled on at least one occasion. If I am correct a week must surely take the record.

That's not a delay though. Not in the terms of a service which has begun and ended it's joirney successfully, just very late.

 

[norbitonflyer]

I was at Gunnersbury last week and the screen showed an Upmister train as 1,245 minutes late. Whether it had actually been stuck at Richmond for the previous 21 hours I don't know, but other trains were running anyway.

 

[MadMac]

There’s a picture out there of the old Glasgow Central arrivals board from 1958 showing multiple cross border trains 10 1/2 hours late.

 

[Deepgreen]

We were on a trans-Canadian rail trip in 1999 and our train from Winnipeg to Jasper was 18 hours late owing to a freight train derailment and a subsequent 600 mile diversion! We had to stay another night in Winnipeg as a result (when we would much have preferred an extra night in Jasper!).

 

[ANDREW_D_WEBB]

I was at Gunnersbury last week and the screen showed an Upmister train as 1,245 minutes late. Whether it had actually been stuck at Richmond for the previous 21 hours I don't know, but other trains were running anyway.

Noticed several London Overground station displays show cancelled trains as very late.

 

[jammmmmsssssss]

Also for freight Im pretty sure there was a 1100 minute one (18 hours!)

Yes I think I saw quite a few freights have delays of something around that when there was a major signalling failure at Ely some point last year

 

[cjbirkett]

I had a 5pm arrival into Fort William on the sleeper once with passengers, quite a few 1-2pm runs too. I think some of my colleagues did arrive later than that as well. In later times I think they started detraining at Dumbarton if it was over a certain amount of time late and putting people on coaches but that was after I’d left (moved south in 2005)

We used to phone the station cafe at Crianlarich if running excessively late and order bacon, egg and sausage rolls for the passengers. They did quite a good trade from us at one point!

 

[BingMan]

The Starliner that was to bring Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore,back from the ISS was delayed by 286 days.
Not sure how much compensation Boeing paid them.

 

[SteveHFC]

I'm aware of a freight train that was delayed by 2130 minutes (35.5 hours) due to a planning error by one of my ex-colleagues a few years ago. (Ex-colleague as in he's still there and I've moved on).

 

[Peter Mugridge]

The Starliner that was to bring Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore,back from the ISS was delayed by 286 days.
Not sure how much compensation Boeing paid them.

Actually no, it came back without them after only a few days delay.

The astronauts transferred to a capsule replacement service...

 

[NLC1072]

If you include the rail and sail fares in which also work with delay repay, then... 24 hours in some cases recently on the Rosslare route.

 

[signed]

There have been very publicized TGV delays of 10+ hours, sometimes in tunnels

 

[43096]

There have been very publicized TGV delays of 10+ hours, sometimes in tunnels

10 hours makes them look like amateurs compared to what Amtrak can manage!

 

[styles]

Imagine being actually on a train, delayed for 14 hours, and only getting your £40 fare and some snacks in compensation.

I wonder if people manage to negotiate better compensation in such rare circumstances?

 

[A S Leib]

Would for example Trenitalia offer compensation for hotels if weather made crossing from Sicily to mainland Italy impossible overnight?

 

[signed]

Would for example Trenitalia offer compensation for hotels if weather made crossing from Sicily to mainland Italy impossible overnight?

EU rail regulations use the exceptional circumstances principle (like with EU261), which include weather which bars any compensation

They will put you in a hotel if your night train doesn't run, but that's about it

 

[65477]

I used to use the sleeper between Euston and Glasgow so I could start meetings in Scotland at 09:00. Once I woke from a good nights sleep to find the train still south of Milton Keynes, The attendant then informed me that if I didn't want to continue my journey northwards I could get off at Preston. After a short, and polite conversation it was agreed the train would stop at an earlier station. Due to a diversion I became one of the few people to have travelled by sleeper from London to Northampton.

I never did find out what time the train got to Glasgow but a a minimum it must have been delayed by 6hours.

Due to OHL issues the journey back to London involved a bus replacement service and I got back without any ticket checks, so I didn't have to explain why I was travelling to London on a London - Glasgow ticket

 

[merry]

Actually no, it came back without them after only a few days delay.

The astronauts transferred to a capsule replacement service...

The original capsule returned ECS so counts as cancelled gor passenger service... their delayed return was on a capsule provided by another operator
And there were some freight services carrying supplies that arrived & departed in the interim. Possibly also a fully booked passenger capsule from/to another destination.

 

[signed]

10 hours makes them look like amateurs compared to what Amtrak can manage!

In absolute terms, yeah, but not really when the average TGV journey hovers around 2h30/3h