CrossCountry Cancels Nearly All Services After Birmingham Power Cut

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps urged publicly owned rail operators to provide additional services where possible after a widespread disruption struck the national network. The call came as CrossCountry cancelled almost all of its scheduled trains across Great Britain on Sunday, following a power outage that knocked out the Birmingham control centre. The outage forced the company to halt most services until further notice, affecting key routes such as Glasgow to Edinburgh, Manchester to Birmingham, Cheltenham to Cardiff and Newcastle to Edinburgh.

CrossCountry’s abrupt suspension of services has left thousands of passengers stranded and prompted a scramble for alternative travel arrangements. The Transport Secretary’s appeal to other publicly owned operators—such as Network Rail, the Department for Transport, and the National Rail network—seeks to mitigate the impact by encouraging them to deploy spare capacity or adjust timetables to accommodate displaced passengers. The government has pledged to investigate the cause of the power cut and to strengthen resilience measures across the rail system to prevent similar disruptions in the future.