Signalling problems brought another morning of chaos for thousands of commuters across south west London this morning.

South Western Railways issued an alert to travellers at 8am, which initially warned of a signalling problem between Twickenham and Whitton.

Last week, there were problems on the same stretch of line, which were subsequently blamed on a piece of maintenance equipment from Network Rail obstructing the track.

Inititally, SWR said the disruption today would last until noon, however they later pushed this back to 2pm.

A separate incident involving trespasserss on the line around Kingston, led to delays and cancellations, in that area.

Furious passengers contacted the rail company via Twitter to complain of persistent delays.

One wrote: "Why are your trains cancelled every morning? How are we going to go to work? How will our child go to school?

"We live in St. Margarets, your trains are cancelled every morning last 10 days…"

The failures come at the same time as SWR is under fire over plans to make permanent cuts to train services through much of south west London. The cuts are being opposed by local MPs, Munira Wilson and Sarah Olney, as well as Richmond Borough Council.

SWR said: 'Due to a signalling issue as well as a trespass on the railway we have experienced large levels of disruption.'

The company confirmed that anyone who suffered a delay of more than 15 minutes will be able to claim some sort of ticket refund.

UPDATE:

A SWR spokesperson said: "We are sorry that two incidents this morning have caused disruption to customers travelling on our Windsor line, Reading line and other services via Richmond and Twickenham.

"The combination of a cable defect near Twickenham station and a trespass incident at Kingston station has resulted in this disruption. Although both of this morning's incidents have now been resolved, we expect services to be impacted until 14:00.

"Once again, we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers".