All Tyne and Wear Metro services were suspended for 90 minutes on Thursday 30th January after a signalling fault in the control room. No trains ran from just after 1030 until shortly after 1200 while the problem was resolved. To complicate matters the fault didn’t allow updates to passengers on the platforms during the fault which led to some staff having to leave the control centre at South Gosforth to let those there at least know what was the problem.
In a statement a spokesman from Nexus says: “We’d like to say sorry to passengers after Metro services were suspended for just over an hour this morning. We are still investigating the full cause of this – but during urgent maintenance at our South Gosforth Control Centre the data feed from Metro’s train management software to the control room monitors and displays went down. As our control room employees could not see the position of trains we halted all services for safety reasons, while the fault with monitors was identified and systems checked and then brought back into use. The train management system itself (RTMS) did not fail and continued to operate safely.”
Eventually ticket acceptance on local buses was agreed around half an hour before a full service resumption was possible. Services then took some time to get fully back to timetable.