The District, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines were part suspended on Wednesday while emergency services responded. All three had reopened by 7pm but were still running with severe delays.
Commuters in central London faced disruption on Wednesday after a casualty on the tracks near Cannon Street. The District, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines were part suspended from about 5.30pm while emergency services dealt with what Transport for London (TfL) called a customer incident. By around 7pm all three had reopened, but with severe delays. Southeastern mainline National Rail services also faced residual crowding and short-notice platform changes during the emergency response.
Which services were affected
According to the original report, the District line was closed between Tower Hill and Earls Court, and the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines had no service between Edgware Road and Aldgate. TfL’s records in the research notes give slightly different boundaries, because restrictions were logged at different times. They list the District line as suspended between Tower Hill and Earl’s Court, the Circle line between Edgware Road and Aldgate via Victoria, and the Hammersmith & City line between Liverpool Street and Barking.
TfL’s alerts, as recorded on JourneyCheck, show how the evening developed:
| Time (28 October) | Update |
|---|---|
| About 5.30pm | Services suspended around Cannon Street |
| 5.54pm | Hammersmith & City alert confirms a casualty on the tracks |
| 6.39pm | District line reports severe delays after the earlier incident |
| 6.54pm | Circle line reports severe delays |
| About 7pm | All three lines reported reopened, with heavy residual disruption |
Ticket acceptance was extended beyond London Buses to operators including London Overground, DLR, the Elizabeth line, c2c and South Western Railway, depending on the line and time of the alert.
What is not known
No statement from British Transport Police has been found giving the person’s identity, age, injuries or condition, or how they came to be on the tracks. The transport alerts do not establish what happened, and no conclusion should be drawn about the person’s fate or the circumstances.
Other problems on the network
The incident came on a day of wider disruption, though the notes say these problems were separate:
- District line: Services between Turnham Green and Ealing Broadway were suspended while engineers removed a tree from the tracks at Ealing Common. TfL also recorded earlier communications-equipment faults and cancellations.
- Piccadilly line: There is no service between Cockfosters and Uxbridge from 28 to 30 October in a scheduled closure. Trains continue between Acton Town and Heathrow, including the airport terminals. Replacement services PL4 (Acton Town to Rayners Lane), PL5 (Finchley Central to Cockfosters) and PL6 (Finsbury Park to Arnos Grove) are running, and TfL advises using the Metropolitan line between Rayners Lane and Uxbridge, and the Elizabeth line for central London to Heathrow.
- Mildmay line: A faulty train at Willesden Junction caused severe delays. An earlier update recorded no service between Gospel Oak and both Richmond and Clapham Junction, and later information described severe delays across the line.
- Suffragette line: There is still no service between South Tottenham and Barking Riverside after the freight train derailment near Barking on 23 October. Disruption is expected to continue until the end of the week.
