A year of excuses to rail against

It had been purchased, presumably, to stave off breakfast-time hunger pangs, but it was to have more far-reaching consequences. The wrapper of a sandwich carelessly discarded, the Tube announcers told us, caused the entire Piccadilly line to grind to a halt.

In a year widely regarded as the worst ever for public transport, when many trains performed with less speed and reliability than their Victorian predecessors, the explanations for some of the delays provided one of the few reasons to smile - providing, of course, that you can take black humour.

From "It's the wrong kind of weather" to "Pigeon droppings fell on our signals", it was a vintage year for excuses.

The sandwich incident came last February, when London Underground erected a sign telling commuters: "Delays will occur following an earlier interruption due to foil on the line. Please take your litter home with you. Thank you." The sandwich wrapper had triggered a signal failure at Hatton Cross.

More metal on the line resulted in delays for Jubilee line passengers in January after a mysterious large box was discovered on the track at Westminster station. An exhaustive investigation finally revealed that the box was, in fact, part of a train radio amplifier system which had fallen from its normal berth a few feet above on the tunnel wall.

February witnessed a particularly grim Monday morning rush hour. The Circle line suffered a complete shutdown, there were severe delays on the Central line after a train broke down at Leytonstone, and signal failures plagued the District line.

What did London Underground come up with to explain this chaos? "We are not sure what the problem is," said a spokesman. "But we had a lot of rain over the weekend."

That wasn't the end of rain-related problems. The wettest April and May for years caused many incidents of short-circuiting signals, causing them to automatically "fail" on red.

Dozens of trains were stalled for no reason. By June Railtrack was blaming a five per cent increase in delays on "the wrong kind of weather".

Later that month Railtrack blamed delays on "an outbreak of buddleia" - a strange excuse, given that the purple-flowered plant has long been associated with railway sidings and does tend to flower every summer - similar, in fact, to the way trees shed their leaves each autumn. But still Railtrack insisted that the unusually humid summer had created the perfect climate for the plant, which had consequently embedded itself into brickwork at many stations, outbuildings and bridges across the network.

Hundreds of rail workers had to be diverted from other duties to uproot it, said Railtrack, which in turn delayed trains.

When in October Railtrack faced a record £70 million fine for failing to hit its target for reducing delays, the company argued that the rain six months earlier had encouraged more buds to sprout on the trees, which meant more leaves to fall in the autumn, which held up more trains. The then chief executive, Gerald Corbett, explained: "I'm afraid it's difficult to run the trains sometimes."

An act of golf rather than God held up more than 400 passengers at Sevenoaks station by almost an hour last month after a metal golfing umbrella fell on a live section of track.

And last month, in Rochdale, a group of passengers were trapped on a platform in freezing temperatures after station staff had locked up and gone home, thinking the last train had already departed.

This embarrassment prompted John Moor-house of the North West Rail Users' Consultative Committee to say: "There is no excuse for this." He should have noted the Railtrack line: there is always an excuse.

In June the company explained the cause of a 13 hour delay in Ashford, Kent. The droppings of a single pigeon, it said, had landed on a vital component at a power sub-station, wreaking havoc with signalling.

There was some good news, however. A Rail-track spokesman explained: "Our engineers are happy to report that the pigeon survived."