Liverpool Street and Waterloo cancellations: Rail chaos at key London stations in last weekend of August

Travellers to and from Stansted airport are also affected

The last weekend in August has begun with mass cancellations of trains at key London terminals.

Commuters from Essex, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire faced extremely difficult journeys after overhead wire damage in the Harlow Mill area brought trains on one of Greater Anglia’s main lines to a standstill.

The link to London Liverpool Street has closed for much of the morning rush hour because of the Network Rail problem.

Travelling in the opposite direction, thousands of airline passengers planning to fly from Stansted and relying on the airport’s express service from Liverpool Street have had to find alternatives – with many of them scrambling for taxis to the Essex airport.

Friday is the busiest day of the week on many of the routes to and from Stansted.

Across at Britain’s busiest railway station, London Waterloo, barely half the normal rail services are running because of another strike in a long-running dispute over the role of guards.

The industrial action has been called by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT). It is aimed at disrupting services from Friday to midnight on Monday.

South Western Railway runs services from Waterloo to southwest London, Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset and Berkshire.

While the main trunk lines to Portsmouth, Southampton and Bournemouth are running a regular but reduced service, on other lines there are drastic reductions and in some cases rail replacement buses.