Fireball erupts from train carriage after ‘two bangs’ at Fulwell station in London

People evacuated a train in ‘panic’ after two explosions rocked the carriage in southwest London.

Commuter journeys were disrupted on the South Western Railway line between Shepperton and Waterloo after a fire exploded underneath the carriage this morning.

Metro’s Adam Williamson was on board the train with his young daughter when the incident happened at about 10.20am while they were stopped at Fulwell station near Twickenham.

After evacuating with a pram, a second explosion rocked the train right where they had been sitting some minutes before.

He said: ‘We were riding near the front of the front carriage. Suddenly, there was a bang, but I didn’t immediately think too much of it.

‘Then there were two inspectors who were sitting down near us, and they suddenly jumped up and panicked.

‘They said there was smoke, and I then saw it right next to us.

‘We left the carriage at the other end just as smoke was coming off.

‘There was then a second bang and the fireball came out.’

He said it looked like a ‘ball of fire’ before thick smoke began billowing from the carriage.

The dad said he couldn’t help but think about what could have happened if the inspectors had not been at the front of the train.

‘I wonder what would have happened if those two inspectors hadn’t been there, it might have taken a little longer to dawn on me that there was smoke.  

‘What if I just carried on sitting there and we were caught out in the subsequent bang?’

SWR told Metro it is investigating a fault with a train at Fulwell, but no fire has been reported.

Some lines in the area are blocked after the incident, and journeys are likely to take longer until 1pm, South Western Railway said on X.

Elsewhere, trains face major disruption between London Liverpool Street, Stansted Airport, Hertford and Cambridgeshire after a signal fault in Broxbourne.

Some lines on the route are blocked after the issue this morning shortly before 6am.

Trains may be cancelled or delayed by up to an hour, National Rail warned.

Disruption from the fault is expected to last at least until 1pm.

Meanwhile, the National Rail website is one of countless websites hit by an outage after Amazon Web Services crashed.

Follow our live blog for the latest outage updates

People trying to access the National Rail enquiries website are currently seeing a 404 error page.

The technical issue means the information displayed may be out of date, National Rail said.

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