STORM force winds caused rail chaos for Petersfield commuters, after track damage caused by a fallen tree at Milford station halted northbound services for eight hours last Thursday.

Network Rail received the first report that the Portsmouth to Waterloo line was blocked next to the railway crossing just south of Milford Station at 5.20am.

Services were cancelled both ways while the blockage was removed. Southbound services were restored after 9am but severe damage both to the conductor rail and the track meant northbound services remained closed until 1pm.

South Western Railway laid on buses to ferry passengers by road between stations, while engineers resolved the problems.

A Network Rail spokesman said: “Normal working resumed through Milford at 1pm.

“To get the lines up and running again, we needed to remove the tree itself and fix damage to a section of conductor rail.

“A section of the track also needed to be slewed after the tree had been removed.

“We also had reports of fallen trees on the line at Petersfield and Godalming, but we had teams on standby and those were quite quickly cleared away.”

It meant more misery for passengers after four days of strikes by some staff on South Western Railway services since Christmas, in the long-running dispute with the RMT over the numbers of guards on trains, which also paralysed Southern services throughout 2017.

* Rail passengers suffered further misery on Wednesday morning, following eight-hour delays on the Portsmouth to Waterloo line last Thursday, when a fire broke out on board a train between Havant and Haslemere. The fire, which was swiftly put out with no one injured, was caused by an equipment failure.

South Western Railway laid on replacement buses but normal services weren’t restored until early afternoon.