National Rail has issued an apology after someone hijacked the vacant Twitter account of National Express East Anglia.

At 2am on Sunday, February 5, the franchise for the eastern rail franchise was taken over by Greater Anglia and the @NXEAnglia account was replaced by @greateranglia as the official rail Twitter service.

Someone continued tweeting with the account however, leading to a tweet from a National Rail account, @NRE_NXEA, which read: 'We apologise for the misuse of this account. The person responsible is no longer part of the organisation and we regret any offence caused.'

Many of the tweets were silly in nature and some were offensive, such as: 'Okay so there's delays and stuff with the chuff chuffs. I'll carry on being as informative as I can and stuff.'

Other posts included 'There's panic here in the office. The supervisors think there's an 'outside' hacker yet I'm just sat here as usual' and 'There's delays in Romford. You may as well get out and push.'