London Underground services suspended after power outage

London Underground services have been suspended because of power failures.

The Transport for London (TfL) website on Monday afternoon showed the entire Bakerloo and Suffragette lines were suspended, while there were severe delays and part suspensions on the Elizabeth line and the Jubilee and Northern lines.

A spokesman for TfL told the PA news agency there was an outage in south-west London for “a matter of minutes” and “everything shut down” because of a “National Grid issue”.

He went on: “When the power goes out, the trains will have stopped, obviously, there’s emergency power on trains and stations so everything wouldn’t have gone completely black, if you were on there, but the trains would have stopped and we would have cleared some stations because there’s no electricity it might not necessarily be safe for them to be open … some people would have probably been stuck in a tunnel for a little bit of time.”

The disruption came after a cable fault which led to a fire at an electrical substation in the Cunningham Place and Aberdeen Place area in Maida Vale, a London Fire Brigade (LFB) spokesperson said.

Firefighters were called to the substation and three metres of high voltage cabling were destroyed, it is understood.

It comes weeks after a fire at the same substation, which saw elderly and vulnerable residents among those moved out of their homes.

However, Monday’s fire is understood to have involved different equipment to the blaze on April 29.

None of the Overground lines were affected and TfL was in the process of “getting things back up and running again”, the TFL spokesman said.

TfL officials were seen directing passengers with suitcases away from Elizabeth line services at Paddington station, recommending they use buses to get across central London instead.

The Bakerloo line entrance had been completely shut at Paddington.

TfL staff said they did not know when the entrance would reopen.

They said: “It was a power outage. The lights just went off, we don’t know anything else.

“It’s been about an-hour-and-a-half now. We can’t say when it will be fixed.”

A National Grid spokesperson said: “We apologise for any inconvenience following a fault on our transmission network in central London this afternoon.

“The fault was resolved within seconds and did not interrupt supply from our network, but a consequent voltage dip may have briefly affected power supplies on the low voltage distribution network in the area.

“We once again apologise for any inconvenience and ongoing travel disruption.”