Football fans suffered five-hour 'rail journey from hell'

A group of football fans endured a "rail journey from hell" after it took them more than five-and-a-half hours to get home from a game.

The Sutton United supporters were hit by a series of cancellations on Thameslink, the operator owned by the same franchise which runs Southern Railway.

The Vanarama league game at Borehamwood finished at 9.30pm on Tuesday night with the group of around 50 Sutton fans expecting a 90-minute journey home – bad enough after seeing their team lose 1-0.

But, as so often happens in life, things didn't quite go to plan. They were first delayed by nearly an hour at Borehamwood, and when they eventually got a train to London Blackfriars the Sutton connecting service was cancelled.

After another delay, they got on the last Sutton service, which got stuck behind a broken train at Herne Hill.

The fans said they were "dumped" at Loughborough Junction, which was closed and locked up, before a train took them back to Blackfriars, where they waited nearly two hours for taxis home, eventually arriving back in Sutton at 3.15am.

A spokesman for the Sutton fanzine Gandermonium said: "If we thought it was bad getting done over 1-0 by Borehamwood, we hadn't reckoned with the journey from hell that Thameslink had in store for us. We worked out we could probably have walked home quicker as the whole nightmare journey home lurched from fiasco to chaos.

"The staff at Blackfriars were brilliant. It's not their fault that their employers are a bunch of jokers you wouldn't trust to run a line on Hackney Marshes let alone a major rail franchise."

A Thameslink spokesman has since apologised to the fans for the delay.