South West Trains has warned its customers to expect delays and cancellations for the rest of the day after a major signal failure.

Commuters were urged to avoid London Waterloo altogether during Monday morning's rush hour as the outage brought travel chaos to the country's busiest railway station.

Trains across the company's entire network were delayed by up to 90 minutes, while other services were subject to last-minute cancellations.

The disruption began when all signalling was lost in the Earlsfield area, leaving SWT unable to run trains into Waterloo.

Image: Many trains have been cancelled, while others were delayed by up to 90 minutes

A Network Rail spokesman said: "We're sorry for the disruption this will cause to people's journeys this morning, and will continue to work to resume a normal service as quickly as possible."


SWT passengers were already facing delays this morning because of a track defect on a set of points between Woking and Surbiton - blocking the London-bound fast line.

The disruption comes days before the start of major work at Waterloo to extend platforms, which is set to cause three weeks of delays at the transport hub.

Image: Waterloo is the country's busiest railway station

Stagecoach has lost the franchise to run SWT, with a consortium of First Group and Hong Kong-based MTR taking over next month.

The RMT union has warned that vital services have been left on a knife edge following a series of cuts to railway budgets.

General Secretary Mick Cash said: "The state of transport services right across London this morning serves is the clearest possible warning to this Government that their policy of hacking back the budgets of both Network Rail and Transport for London is dragging Tube and rail in the capital city into permanent chaos."