“The fault was more extensive than we first thought, but it should be solved during the afternoon,” Denny Josefsson of the Swedish Transport Authority (Trafikverket) told the TT news agency earlier during the day.

Some 8,000 passengers travelling on services operated by national rail operator SJ, Stockholm transport authority SL and the Arlanda Express are believed to have been affected.

First it was thought that an electric wire which had fallen down over the rails had caused the outage, but later the Swedish Transport Authority discovered that there had also been a fire at a power station.

“The electric wire made the situation worse. It was bad luck that these two incidents occurred at the same time,” Josefsson said.

The trains going north towards Dalarna were redirected through Västerås with major delays of up to two hours. Other train routes were cancelled and replacement buses put in operation.

Trains towards Sundsvall and Gävle were subsequently allowed to pass the affected area at a reduced speed, writes the daily Dagens Nyheter (DN).

“There will be major delays even when the trains are up and running because the large number of rains that have been cancelled,” Thelma Henrysson of SJ told the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper during the afternoon.

The train traffic was up and running again by 6pm although commuters can still expect delays on some routes, according to the Swedish Transport Authority (Trafikverket).

Salomon Rogberg