TRAINS were cancelled and delayed after a signal failure caused chaos yesterday.

A faulty piece of equipment at the Haywards Heath tunnel meant trains had to stop outside the entrance before being talked through by railway staff.

The problem was first reported at 7.10am, with 13 trains cancelled and dozens more delayed between Brighton and London until the early-evening rush-hour.

A National Rail spokesman said the fault posed no safety risk to train passengers.

He said: “There was a fault with a piece of equipment called the track circuit which detects where trains are on the line and, in turn, prompts the signals.

“That was intermittently faulty and it is designed to be fail-safe so it turned all the signals to red.

“This caused considerable disruption and we are very sorry about that.”

With the tunnel signals red, train staff had to talk each driver through the tunnel while other trains backed up on either side.

It was mid-afternoon by the time engineers fixed the fault, with delays and cancellations until 5pm.

The National Rail spokesman said that because of the large number of delays and cancellations, there was a knock-on effect to other services.

And as a result there continued to be problems across Sussex long after the fault was fixed.

At the peak of the problems those trains that were running were delayed for more than an hour.

Frustrated passengers took to social media to express their frustration.

Johny Cassidy, a BBC journalist, Tweeted: “A beautiful morning of mayhem and confusion courtesy of Southern rail whose incompetence knows no bounds.”

Student Saia Moizuddin, said: “I hate the fact that I have to rely on Southern rail to get to uni every day. I'm gonna (SIC) be late on my second day.”

Craig Rennie added: “I try and do the good thing and get into college early but the train is cancelled anyway. Southern rail are useless.”

Despite minimal disruption to afternoon rush hour commuters, the earlier problem continued to have a knock on impact on early evening services.

The 6.26pm London Victoria to Brighton was cancelled and the 5.30pm Brighton to Ashford International, 5.57pm London Victoria to Seaford and 7.10pm London Victoria to Horsham were all affected.

The fault also affected Thameslink services with delays of up to an hour.

As a result of the problems, Southern bosses are now facing a compensation bill of thousands of pounds under their delay repay scheme.

Any journey delayed by 30 minutes or more against the published train schedule (including train cancellation) will be compensated.

For more details about claiming compensation visit www.southernrailway.com/your-journey/customer-services/delay-repay.