One, John Marchant, gave up catching his Southern Carshalton to Dorking train on Tuesday morning and abandoned his commute to work from home instead.
It comes after Southern Railway announced that none of its services will call at London Victoria, Clapham Junction, Battersea Park nor Wandsworth Common until Jan 10 owing to Covid-related shortages.
No London Overground services were able to run between Clapham Junction and Surrey Quays on Tuesday morning due to a fault on a train.
National Rail Enquiries warned passengers that a “problem under investigation” between Darlington and York was causing disruption between the stations.
This affected CrossCountry, London North Eastern Railway and TransPennine Express services.
Merseyrail services were suspended between Kirkdale and Kirkby following a power supply problem.
Urgent repairs were being carried out to replace part of the signalling system in Slade Green, south-east London, following an electrical fault.
The issue meant the line through the station towards Dartford was blocked, affecting Southeastern trains.
Network Rail tweeted that it sent technicians to Lewisham, also in south-east London, to fix a new set of points which “worked fine all night in testing and of course has gone wrong now”.
The problem caused disruption to Southeastern services on one of the main lines into the capital.
Rail journeys across Britain were also being hit by many operators using reduced timetables in a bid to improve reliability after weeks of short-notice cancellations due to staff shortages caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
ScotRail implemented a temporary weekday timetable on Tuesday as the Omicron variant of Covid-19 has resulted in a “large number of absences”.
More than 150 daily services have been cut, including on routes such as Glasgow to Edinburgh via Airdrie/Bathgate; Glasgow Central to Lanark; Edinburgh to North Berwick; and Edinburgh to Tweedbank.
Other examples include Southern not serving London Victoria until January 10, while CrossCountry has removed around 50 daily trains from its timetables until next week.
Demand for rail travel is at around 50% of pre-pandemic levels. This is partly due to the guidance for people to work from home. The first working day of the year in Scotland is on Wednesday.
A Rail Delivery Group spokesman said: “We are working hard to provide the most reliable service possible and so that passengers can travel with confidence when fewer rail staff can work, a number of operators are introducing amended timetables.
“There are also some short-notice cancellations so our advice to anyone travelling is to check online before they set out or to sign up for automatic alerts from National Rail Alert Me.”
