Commuters faced delays and cancellations across the whole c2c network yesterday after "attempted cable theft" at a station.

At about 5am yesterday morning (November 21) all signalling was lost between Barking and West Ham.

The signalling fault caused delays and cancellations across the whole c2c network until after the evening rush hour.

Bosses have now revealed the fault was caused by damage to the cables after an "attempted cable theft".

Network Rail dispatched a team of engineers to the area who then discovered deliberate damage had been caused to cables that feed the overhead lines and multiple components were damaged.

Because of the overhead lines damage and the signalling failure, no services could run on the London-bound track between Barking and West Ham until the power lines and signal failures were repaired by Network Rail.

This severely restricted the number of trains c2c could operate.

A limited number of services were run through the affected area but these were suspended at 7am due to an emergency isolation to fix the fault with the overhead lines and the signal failure.

The train operator was able to terminate and restart most services from Barking. 

Once the issue was fixed, normal running commenced just after 4.16pm.

However, the damage to the overhead lines and signals caused some knock-on delays and cancellations to the c2c service.

Arrangements were made for c2c tickets to be accepted on Greater Anglia and London Underground services to help provide alternative options for travel.

Rob Mullen, managing director of c2c, said: “We are really sorry to all of our customers who were caught up in yesterday’s disruption on the c2c route, which was due to attempted cable theft at West Ham.

“We know this will have caused extensive delays to your journeys especially as it happened at the worst possible time i.e. the morning peak.

"We worked closely with our Network Rail colleagues throughout the day to get our services up and running as quickly as possible and thanks to their hard work, services recovered quickly for those customers travelling during the late afternoon and into the evening.”

Those who were delayed will be able to get compensation - find out how on the c2c website.