Great Western Coffee Shop

Normal South West Trains service planned for evening peak
^ Broken rail between Vauxhall and London Waterloo repaired by Network Rail engineers
^ Disruption due to earlier cable theft incident between Basingstoke and Farnborough cleared
^ South West Trains and Network Rail apologise to passengers
^ Latest customer updates at www.southwesttrains.co.uk or via Twitter @SW_Trains
South West Trains expects to operate a normal service in the evening peak tonight (17 January 2012) following earlier Network Rail track and signalling problems.
A broken rail between Vauxhall and Waterloo has disrupted services in and out of London Waterloo Station today. Network Rail engineers, who identified the problem this morning, have now repaired the track. A full train service is now running and is expected to operate as normal for passengers travelling home from work.
Disruption to services between Basingstoke and Farnborough, which was caused by an earlier cable theft incident at Winchfield, has also been cleared.
Network Rail and South West Trains today apologised to customers for the disruption.
Jake Kelly, Customer Service Director for South West Trains, said: "We are extremely frustrated that our passengers' journeys have been disrupted again this morning and we are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. This was caused by criminals stealing cables at Winchfield, which disrupted trains between Basingstoke and Woking. The problem was then compounded when a broken rail just outside London Waterloo severely disrupted services across our network despite Network Rail engineers working hard to resolve both problems as quickly as possible.
"We are aware that there have been a number of incidents in recent months which have meant we have not provided our customers with the level of service they expect. We would like to reassure them that we are working together with Network Rail to resolve these problems as quickly as we can."
Richard O^Brien, Network Rail^s route managing director for Wessex, said: "Today has been very frustrating for many passengers travelling by train to and from the south west of London and we apologise for the disruption to their journeys. The discovery of the broken rail between Waterloo and Vauxhall ^ one of the busiest stretches of railway in the country ^ means we could only run trains safely on one line rather than the two we normally have available. We have been able to carry out a temporary repair in order to run a full train service this evening and engineers will carry out further work overnight to fix the problem fully.
"Passengers travelling on the Southampton main line faced additional disruption this morning following the theft of 18 cables, which resulted in a complete loss of signalling between Basingstoke and Farnborough. Engineers replaced the stolen cables, repaired the damage and reopened the lines by 7.18am. We continue to support proposed legislation for tougher sentences for cable thieves and believe the police must be given the powers they need to shut down the rogue scrap dealers who are profiting from the travelling public^s misery and costing the rail industry millions of pounds a year, which is money we would otherwise spend on improving and maintaining our railway."

I had a good day on SWT myself, enjoying (as well as the usual rail-related stuff) a nice walk around Whimple, a massive cheeseburger in Feniton, and a very well-run, friendly new(ish) kiosk at Honiton station which also provided me with a free paper to go with my cuppa.