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Rail misery as football fans suffer five-and-a-half hour journey home


A group of around 50 Sutton United football fans took a staggering five and a half hours to get home on Thameslink on a journey which should have taken 75 minutes.

The problem started after they left the match at Borehamwood at 9.30pm on Tuesday to head home to Sutton following a national league fixture.

At the station they were informed of a number of cancellations which delayed them for nearly an hour. Eventually they caught a train to Blackfriars – but the Sutton connecting service was cancelled.

After another long delay they boarded the last Sutton service of the evening… only to come to a stop behind a broken down train at Herne Hill which halted all Southern services.

They were ordered off the train at Loughborough Junction which was locked and closed… another train then took them back to Blackfriars.

At Blackfriars they waited nearly two hours for cabs to take them home, arriving back in Sutton and 3.15 am.

1.30 am. The streets of Blackfriars. Hoping for a cab after a journey from hell. Gatwick passengers missed flights. pic.twitter.com/Zaq4HYulRJ

– Bornatotter (@bornatotter)November 23, 2016

To make matters worse Sutton lost 1-0.

A spokesman for the Sutton fanzine Gandermonium said: “If we thought it was bad getting done over one nil be Borehamwood we hadn’t reckoned with the journey from hell that the clown car Thameslink operation had in store for us.

“We worked out we could probably have walked home quicker as the whole nightmare journey home lurched from fiasco to chaos.

“The staff at Blackfriars were brilliant. It’s not their fault that their employers are a bunch of jokers you wouldn’t trust to run a line on Hackney Marshes let alone a major rail franchise.”

Thameslink is owned by Govia Thamleslink (GTR) which also owns Southern Rail which today suffered they second half of a 48-hour strike in the long running dispute over the changing role of train guards.

Thameslink has been contacted for comment.

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