Rail passengers stranded on tracks near Penkridge

Train passengers were stranded for up to three hours and forced to clamber down onto the tracks amid chaos on the West Midlands rail network.

A serious fault on the line at Penkridge, which took 36 hours to fix after it was discovered, caused disruption for thousands of passengers.

By 9am today, when the problem was fixed, 700 trains across the West Midlands had been affected.

More than 50 were cancelled and 130 terminated before their original destination. Total delays reached 9,000 minutes – more than six days.

Trains between Birmingham New Street and Wolverhampton were among those delayed by up to an hour or cancelled today. Knock on delays affected services until around 11.30am today.

Replacement buses ran between Stafford and Wolverhampton this morning. Passengers at Albrighton, Codsall and Bilbrook were affected.

The line originally failed at 8.30pm on Monday then the overhead line snapped yesterday morning. Tim Rowlands, a DJ from Penkridge, described seeing a flash of light as a cable fell.

The fault led to dozens of passengers having to use ladders in a "controlled evacuation" at Penkridge.

Network Rail spokesman John Crampton said test trains were sent out just after 9am.

He said: "How quickly services were back to normal depended on where the trains were as a result of the disruption and when the train companies could get them to the right stations."