Thrown cigarette may be cause of Tube fire chaos

Thousands of Tube passengers have been hit by disruption after a fire destroyed 50-year-old cables at Barking station.

District line services between Dagenham East and Plaistow, and Hammersmith & City line services between Whitechapel and Barking, were suspended.
A full service may be restored by Wednesday.

The heat from Friday's fire, possibly sparked by a cigarette, was so intense that cables and equipment melted. Specialist engineers have worked over the weekend to splice new cabling, but service on the two lines remains restricted.

A spokesman said: "We are investigating the cause of the fire. There is a public footbridge across the line where we run our cables. It is possible that someone may have thrown a cigarette end."

Services were suspended until this morning between Plaistow and Dagenham East on the District line and between Whitechapel and Barking on the Hammersmith & City line. Circle line services were out of action until this morning on the branch between Hammersmith and Edgware Road.

Howard Collins, London Underground's chief operating officer, said: "On behalf of LU I would like to apologise for the disruption caused by this incident. Our engineers have been working around the clock to get as many services as possible back up and running, and we are now in a position where the majority of stations affected on Friday now have some service.

"There will be some disruption through the early part of this week, but we are doing everything we can to resume normal services as soon as possible."

To add to Tube passengers' problems this morning, a signal failure at Baker Street caused delays to Metropolitan line services.