THE Prime Minister has been urged to intervene in the ongoing rail crisis in Sussex after commuters faced rush hour chaos on Tuesday.

Maria Caulfield, MP for Lewes, spoke during Prime Minister’s Questions to beg Theresa May to step in.

It came after an electrical fault burnt through the track at Wivelsfield causing the line to be closed for five hours on Tuesday evening.

Ms Caulfield MP said: “The last 18 months have been hell for commuters in my constituency in Lewes using the Southern network.

"Last night a journey time that should have taken just over an hour took over four hours.

“Can I therefore beg the Prime Minister to intervene on the Southern rail network, for while we have a country that works for everyone, in Sussex we have a railway that works for no one.”

Engineers discovered the problem with the track on the northbound line at 4pm, shutting the track in both directions.

At 7 pm the southbound line was reopened between Haywards Heath and Brighton, allowing one 12 carriage train to travel back and forth while replacement bus services were brought in.

The line was fully reopened at 9pm but delays continued until the end of service.

Peter Kyle, MP for Hove, in a letter to the Rail Minister Paul Maynard said it took far too long for replacement buses to be sent adding that the crowding at stations was simply unacceptable.

He called for robust contingency plans, adding: “We cannot endure any more repeats of what happened on Tuesday so can you speak to both Govia Thameslink Railway and Network Rail about this as a matter of urgency and demand that they learn the lessons from this fiasco.”

Thousands of commuters were caught up in the fresh chaos with it taking some five hours to get from London to Brighton.

Bradley Rees, a 42-year-old IT worker from Worthing, said it was lucky no passengers were injured.

He said: “There wasn’t sufficient space on the platform for the number of people there were. How no one was injured I don’t know - the crowding on the platform was beyond dangerous.”

It comes as the RMT prepare for their latest strike action tomorrow with workers walking out for 48 hours.

Union leaders yesterday demanded Transport Secretary Chris Grayling "get out of his bunker" and try to help resolve the continuing problems.

RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: "It's all very well Southern trying to blame Network Rail for the chaos but the fact remains that, if the company wasn't hoarding £100 million in profits, that cash could be invested in renewals and maintenance, easing the intolerable pressure on our rail infrastructure."

ANGRY PASSENGERS CRAMMED AT THE GATE OF HELL

TIRED, bemused, frustrated. These are the expressions of commuters at their wits’ end with the constant array of setbacks on the rail network.

Despite having the fifth biggest economy in the world, Britain is still grappling with the basics.

These pictures taken on Tuesday evening show the agony of train users who just wanted to get home after a day’s work.

The problem was an electrical fault at Keymer Junction, a track interchange near Wivelsfield. A surge of power had burnt a segment out of the track earlier in the day and engineers were frantically trying to repair the damage to get services flowing again.

The damage crippled the northbound line but the route was shut in both directions initially.

Once the southbound side was reopened, IT worker Bradley Rees was one of those who got a train to Haywards Heath before a shuttle train took him onwards.

He said passengers were lucky not to be injured, such was the backlog of footfall.

The 42-year-old said: “There wasn’t sufficient space on the platform for the number of people who were there.

“How no one was injured I don’t know – the crowding on the platform was beyond dangerous.”

After attempting to catch the 5.46pm London Victoria train, Mr Rees did not get home to Worthing until 9pm.

He blamed Southern’s lack of contingency plans for the disruption: “There was clearly no contingency plan last night. It was chaos.

“You accept there will be days when there will be technical issues, but the way it was dealt with by Southern was unbelievable.”

Commuters could be forgiven for recalling Dante’s Inferno. How fitting it would be for railway stations, much like the gate of hell in the epic Divine Comedy poem, to now bear the words “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”.

Hannah Tyler, who lives in Burstead Close, Brighton, commutes to East Croydon for a retail buying job and was caught up in the chaos.

The 33-year-old said: “People feel like it’s getting harder and harder. It’s really impacting on the work/life balancing.

“It’s like the Wild West, it’s chaotic, a free-for-all. It’s actually quite scary. It’s so irresponsible.”

Her normal journey takes 50 minutes but she spent three hours getting home on Tuesday.

Miss Tyler said: “I got to East Croydon at 5pm and a lot of trains were cancelled.

“I ended up getting a train to Three Bridges and then one to Brighton but they were both massively chaotic and slow. They were absolutely crammed, person to person.

“At one point there was a woman shouting, ‘There’s a space, you can move, you can move, but she couldn’t see the pushchair inside. There were People were having heated phone calls and cancelling their plans.”

At Three Bridges she described a sea of people trying to get on an already-heaving train, adding: “It’s getting so bad that I’m going to start claiming my delay-repay compensation,” she said.“It was not even a strike day but it was still bad. That’s what’s really frustrating. Nobody knows what’s going on. I feel sorry for the staff.”

Edward Munn was lucky enough to hop off his train from London Victoria at Haywards Heath but he was still “packed in like sardines”.

Mr Munn, 28, said: “At Victoria most trains were either cancelled or delayed, with no real announcements.

“I got on a 6pm train and a few minutes later we had an announcement to say they didn’t know where the driver was. Then another voice said the service was cancelled.

“There were hundreds of us stacked on the train. I was incredibly frustrated and That’s what people are really angry about. The fault on the line was not the problem – it was the way it was handled further down the chain.”

After eventually getting the 6.30pm service to Haywards Heath, there were more problems.

“To add insult to injury the doors didn’t work on our carriage,” Mr Munn said, “So it was pretty shambolic really. There was lots of sighing and desperate laughing by that point.”

Mr Munn eventually managed to extricate himself from the melee, where a crush of people was blocking the platform footbridge.