Thousands of commuters face the prospect of further disruption to rail travel stretching into next week, after Network Rail again failed to complete key engineering work.

The new year misery affecting Britain’s rail service left up to 200,000 people without their normal rail service yesterday, after overrunning repair work closed London’s second-busiest station and paralysed one of the UK’s busiest railway lines.

Work by Network Rail on the West Coast Main Line, which runs between London and Scotland, will cause further delays today, while a section of line in the West Midlands remains closed. The company, which had promised to complete the repairs by New Year’s Eve, could not confirm last night whether services would be running by Monday.

Passengers face a year of disruption on the West Coast line as there will be engineering works almost every weekend and in the summer.

The latest disruption comes days after commuters were hit by fare increases of more than double the rate of inflation. The Times revealed this week that thousands of passengers are planning a fares strike this month in protest at the hike.

More than 60,000 passengers on the West Coast Main Line were forced to take buses between Birmingham International and Northampton, adding two hours to the journey.

A further 128,000 commuters were affected by the closure of Liverpool Street station in London. The company had promised to have the station running a normal service by yesterday morning. It was due to reopen fully this morning.

Network Rail issued an apology yesterday for failing to keep to its repair schedule, which could cost it millions of pounds in fines. Last Christmas the company was fined £2.4 million for failing to complete a resignalling scheme at Portsmouth on time. It said that the affected area of the West Coast line, around the Rugby area, would remain closed today. The repair programme started on Christmas Day.

The West Coast line is the UK’s busiest “mixed traffic” railway, carrying passengers and freight from Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool to London. More than 75 million journeys are made on the route every year.

The work causing the delay is part of a £415 million upgrade to Rugby station. A lack of “specialist engineers” is being blamed for the hold-up.

Tony Collins, chief executive of Virgin Trains, said that the situation was a “fiasco and our customers expect and deserve better”.

Passengers spoke yesterday of difficult journeys caused by the disruption. Alison Simpole, 43, who is disabled, was travelling from London to Manchester when she was stranded at Birmingham International.

“Instead of getting one train direct to Manchester, we travelled to Northampton and were told to take a replacement coach to Birmingham for a connecting train,” she said. “This journey will have taken me six hours.”

Passenger groups have urged commuters to claim compensation. A spokesman for Passenger Focus encouraged passengers to “send out a clear message to the train operators that this is not the service that they should receive”.

Network Rail said yesterday that it was extremely sorry for the delays and had launched an investigation into what went wrong. It faces a multimillion-pound fine after Virgin Trains reported it to the Office of Rail Regulation, which described the delay as “extremely disappointing”.

Chris Gibb, managing director of Virgin Trains, said: “This is a major inconvenience to tens of thousands of our customers returning to work tomorrow and it is not acceptable. It is the third successive day that this project has overrun, and this makes us deeply concerned about the delivery of the project. Our customers have shown great patience. I’m sure their patience, like ours, has now run out.”

Liverpool Street was closed on December 23 while a bridge was demolished as part of the East London Line extension project. As the gateway to the City, its closure is likely to have cost the economy millions of pounds. Thousands of commuters in the East of England were stranded. Holidaymakers wanting to use the Stansted Express service to Stansted airport also had their plans left in tatters.

Passenger Focus, an independent rail consumer watchdog, said that the industry must do all it can to avoid a similar incident in the future. “Passengers are paying more but the rail industry must keep its side of the bargain by keeping its promises on engineering work,” Anthony Smith, its chief executive, said. “Telling people not to travel on a working day is an extraordinary message.”

Louise Ellman, a Labour MP and senior member of the Transport Select Committee, said she would call for an urgent inquiry into the delays. She said: “This is a fiasco which has caused massive inconvenience to thousands of people.

“We do not want to return to the bad old days of Railtrack when maintenance work was uncoordinated and the tracks fell into disrepair.”

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