This morning’s trains weren’t good. Mine was delayed by 10 minutes due to congestion on the line. The ones going in the other direction, running London to Clacton, were 40 minutes late due to signal failure.

That seems to be an ever-more common reason for problems right now, which I don’t entirely understand. Signals don’t have moving parts: they’re lights. Points, on the other hand, do have moving parts, yet despite this winter feeling like one of the coldest for a long time they seem to be behaving. So far.

Yesterday’s journey wasn’t much better than today’s. It took over an hour to get from Chelmsford to London – a journey of not much more than 30 miles.

Most of that delay was a long, slow crawl towards the capital with no reason given, although perhaps the notices on the screen this morning are a clue. Seems the line is closed between Stratford and Liverpool Street, Monday to Thursday nights from 23h45 onwards. They’re working on the track again, so perhaps there’s a go-slow notice on that section.

The question is, why? They’re already closing the line west of Shenfield every weekend, so is this overnight work putting right something they got wrong, or are they already late on their schedule?