CHILTERN Railways’ chairman Adrian Shooter has apologised to passengers after services were badly disrupted by signalling problems between Bicester and Banbury on Monday.

The problems followed weekend engineering work at Aynho junction, where the Chiltern Line meets the Oxford-Banbury route.

Testing work due to be finished by 5am over-ran until 6am and it was then found there was a fault with the signal system, which had to be reprogrammed with new computer software on Monday night.

As a result of the fault, manual signalling had to be used instead, limiting the number of trains that could run. There was further overcrowding on Tuesday morning, because a number of trains were out of position for rush-hour services due to the previous day’s disruption.

In a message to passengers, Mr Shooter said: “On reflection, it is clear that we were not adequately prepared for such an eventuality, most importantly in our ability to communicate the issues and what we were doing about it.

“I am very sorry for that and I can assure you that we are reviewing the events and will learn and implement the lessons.”