Some Wellington trains still delayed

Some Wellington commuters are still facing delays following a major fault on the rail system that disrupted hundreds of passengers last night.

This morning's delay was caused by some trains not being in the correct place after a power failure affected an area north of Wellington railway station, shutting down all services in the city yesterday, KiwiRail spokesman Nigel Parry said.

The schedule had been delayed slightly this morning, which would affect some services, he said.

However, last night's electrical fault had been fixed.

During the outage four services were disabled, including an Upper Hutt-bound service carrying 369 passengers, and three trains coming into the city from Paraparaumu, Melling and Upper Hutt.

The passengers travelling to Upper Hutt were kept on the train for 90 minutes before a following diesel locomotive pushed it on to Petone, where it picked up overhead power to continue to Upper Hutt.

One of the in-bound services stopped 30 metres short of the Wellington station and passengers were escorted by staff to the platform, while passengers on the remaining two in-bound trains were transported by bus and shuttle.

Mr Parry said the overhead wiring fault was a possible recurrence of the problems which delayed more than 2000 passengers for two hours on Monday morning.

- NZPA