West Sussex rail delays explained after incident reported between Chichester and Portsmouth

Southern Rail reported at 4.50am today (Friday, April 5) that a ‘points failure between Chichester and Portsmouth’ meant services were being cancelled, delayed and altered.

A statement on X (formerly Twitter) read: “Please allow extra time to complete your journey this morning, and we urge you to check journey planners before setting off.

"This incident will affect services to/from London Victoria and Brighton, and Portsmouth / Southampton.

“The affected journey area will be between Chichester and Southampton / Portsmouth.

“To help keep you moving, you can use your existing ticket on the following: Stagecoach 700 services, between Chichester and Portsmouth & SouthWestern Rail services, between Havant and Portsmouth.”

At 6am, services running to and from these stations were still being affected by this issue, ‘with cancellations or revised calling patterns in effect’.

Passengers were warned at this point that disruption was expected until 8am.

However, the issue was resolved shortly after 7am.

An update at 7.11am read: “Services are no longer affected by the earlier fault with the signalling system between Chichester and Portsmouth.”

The train company explained what a points failure is.

A spokesperson said: “This part of the network uses track circuits to detect the position of trains, these are electrical systems which monitor whether a train is on a section of track.

“When a track circuit fails, the signalling system will interpret this as a train remaining in place, even though there may not be a train present at all, or the previous service may have long since left the area.”