The end of February 2026 had another period to forget for Nottingham Express Transit as more issues combined leading to major service disruption, which at one stage saw no trams able to run on the entire network.
The problems started on the evening of Thursday 26th February 2026 after damage to the overhead wires in the Basford area. These reports first came through at around 1900 and a subsequent update from Nottinghamshire Police stated that the wires had come down in this area.
As a result of this issue no trams were able to run between The Forest and Bulwell.
It was not a quick fix with the disruption continuing throughout Friday 27th February as engineers were on the scene to conduct repairs. Again, no trams ran from The Forest to Bulwell, although a normal service was in place from The Forest to both Toton Lane and Clifton South.
The repairs were due to be completed overnight into Saturday 28th February, but then a further problem came up which meant the Saturday began with no services able to run on the complete NET system. This was down to a network-wide communications issue which meant it was not safe to allow trams to leave the depot.
The network wide disruption affected services for a lot of Saturday, the first trams starting to leave depot just after 1400 and then a near full service back up and running by 1600.
In a statement Joanne Smedley, Head of Service Delivery at NET, said: “We’d like to apologise to all our customers for the disruption and inconvenience caused by today’s power and communications issue. Following an investigation into the cause of the issues by our engineers, we now know the reason for the fault was due to an electrical failure with one of our customer communications channels.
“This then tripped our other systems, resulting in a loss of communications with our trams. However, this has now been fixed.”