A power failure occurred shortly before 2pm on 6 August 2026 at the signalling centre that controls the north-west England rail network from Manchester, leading to temporary train halts and widespread cancellations affecting CrossCountry and London Northwestern Railway services initially.
Network Rail’s backup generators failed to start immediately following the outage at the Manchester rail operating centre. This failure caused signals to default to red, stopping all trains in the affected area. Engineers had to perform a controlled power-up and power-down sequence to safely restore signalling, a process that took several hours. Signalling was fully restored late on 6 August.
Service disruptions persisted into 7 August 2026, impacting Avanti West Coast, East Midlands Railway, Northern, TransPennine Express, and Transport for Wales. Northern Rail advised passengers to avoid travel before 10am on 7 August, while TransPennine Express warned of delays and cancellations continuing until at least midday. National Rail reported that some trains and crews were out of position at service start, extending delays until noon.
Chris Wright, Network Rail’s north-west route director, thanked passengers for their patience and confirmed overnight restoration efforts: “Anyone planning to travel this morning should continue to check before they travel for the latest information.” RMT
union general secretary Eddie Dempsey criticised the absence of a working backup power supply, stating, “The impact of a 90-second power cut in an important operations centre in Manchester, covering a wide geographical area across the north-west, without a working backup supply has clearly been devastating.” He added that the union will collaborate with Network Rail to review infrastructure resilience and future measures.
The disruption affected thousands of passengers across Greater Manchester, parts of the Midlands, and north-west England. Many trains were cancelled or revised to run only parts of their normal routes, leaving numerous passengers unable to complete their
journeys.
National Rail indicated that the disruption on 6 August was intensified by the discovery of a wartime bomb near the railway line between Tamworth and Burton-on-Trent, further complicating service recovery. Andy Bowes-Roden, deputy editor at Modern Railways magazine, said the disruption would ease during 7 August but anticipated that services would not fully return to normal until the following morning.
