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The snow fell at the worst possible time for authorities and public transport companies working to keep services running. Sunday night is the quietest time on the roads and there were too few vehicles passing to prevent the snow from settling several inches deep.

However, Transport for London (TfL) struggled to explain yesterday why, despite a week’s notice of heavy snow, the weather had achieved what the Luftwaffe never managed – the complete shutdown of London’s bus network.

For most of the day, the capital’s 8,000 buses remained in their depots after TfL decided at ten minutes past midnight that it was too dangerous to send them out.

Several drivers had reported skidding and TfL took the most cautious option. Communications, or the lack of them, were part of the problem.

TfL could be sure that its gritters had covered the 5 per cent of roads for which it was responsible. But it did not know the state of the other 95 per cent of roads that are run by the boroughs, despite many councils, including Westminster and Harrow, spreading hundreds of tonnes of salt.

A TfL insider admitted, however, that it should have been possible to run services on shortened routes on the roads that it knew to be reasonably clear.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said that it would been too expensive to have fleets of snowploughs on standby for conditions that happened about once every two decades.

TfL dismissed suggestions that buses could have snow chains, saying they would be “a lot of effort to fit” and could damage the road surface. Staff at TfL’s traffic control centre witnessed some of the skidding on CCTV cameras as it happened. Before such monitoring was available, it was easier for control centres to rely on drivers’ discretion and avoid issuing blanket withdrawals of services.

More than half the 250-mile London Underground network is above ground and snow and ice can prevent trains picking up current from the two power rails at wheel level. The Victoria line is the only one of the 11 main lines entirely below ground and was the only one running a good service yesterday.

The depots are all above ground and many trains were unable to leave sidings when points froze.

On the railways, the main problem was that signalmen and train drivers could not, or did not, get to work, especially in Kent and Sussex.

Safety regulations introduced after the Clapham rail crash in 1988 prevent signalmen from working for more than 12 hours, meaning that the previous shift simply closed the lines when their colleagues failed to turn up. Before 1988 signalmen would have remained on duty for longer in exceptional circumstances.

Train companies also had only limited financial incentives to keep services running: their contracts state that Network Rail foots the bill for weather-related disruption.

Hundreds of sets of points froze on the mainline network and on London Underground because cost savings mean that only the busiest junctions have point heaters.

Without investment in better contingency measures passengers will remain at the mercy of the transport industry’s increasingly risk-averse culture.

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