Video of moment lightning bolt struck railway signal sparking railway chaos
A dramatic viral video captured the moment a lightning strike took out railway services after hitting a signal near a team of scaffolders.
The video of the strike near Penzance, Cornwall, left tens of thousands of people in awe after it was recorded by Zak Harries, a worker at Chris Sedgeman scaffolding yard at Long Rock, between Penzance and Marazion.
The strike appeared to hit something metallic not far from where he and his colleagues were standing at around 6.52am on Tuesday (July 19), leading many to believe it had hit scaffolding at first.
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However, it later emerged that the Great Western Railway said yesterday afternoon, was a lightning strike on a signal between Penzance and St Erth around the same time.
Trains between Penzance and Plymouth were heavily impacted, with delays and cancellations at the last minute after the brief lightning storm that rolled across Cornwall from west to east yesterday (Wednesday, July 20).
Network Rail, which runs railway infrastructure, confirmed just after 4pm that signalling equipment had been damaged by the strike.
A prediction of 4.30 was put in place, and missed, for the resumption of normal service. One commuter told CornwallLive it took them more than three hours to get from Plymouth to Penzance.
They said they were stuck “in the middle of nowhere between Liskeard and Bodmin”, following knock-on problems on the lines due to the signal problems near Penzance.
Rail services resumed to normal at around 6.30pm, with a renewed warning that things might still be delayed until 10.30am today.
Now, a re-examination of Mr Harries’ video suggests the ‘scaffolding’ strike might have been the culprit for the railway chaos of yesterday.
Mr Harries said: “When I looked back at it in slow motion and I paused the frames, it did look like it hit the other side of the road which is the railway. But as it happened it looks so close.”
Slowing down the video to around 25% speed, it’s possible to see what was hit. In the foreground of the video, there’s a light and a set of scaffolding on the Chris Sedgeman yard.
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This is what was first thought to have been hit. In slow motion, it’s possible to see a distant metal object in the background, barely visible against the grey sky, that was hit.
This, Mr Harries said, is right where the railway is and could have been the signal that was knocked out.
This small lightning storm swept across the entire county from around 6.30am until just after midday.
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