Rail commuters experienced a morning of misery after major signalling problems affected a number of the region's rail services, including those between Norwich and London.

The problems, at Chelmsford, caused delays of up to an hour for passengers on Greater Anglia services today with the rail

operator even advising people not to travel at the height of the disruption.

The problems resulted in chaos for commuters at packed stations throughout the region with some deciding to stay at home because

they were unable to get to London to work.

A 35-year-old Norwich worker who was late for work because of the problems described a scene of 'mayhem' when she arrived at Ipswich station.

She said: 'Several commuters were on their phones to their office and several decided to give up and work from home.'

The signalling problems, which affected train services between London Liverpool Street, Clacton, Ipswich, Braintree and Norwich, were later resolved, resulting in services starting to get back to normal from about 1.30pm.

A Greater Anglia spokesman said: 'Following a signal failure in the Chelmsford area, Greater Anglia's mainline services were severely disrupted whilst Network Rail identified and fixed the problem.

'Once signalling was restored, we worked to recover a normal service as quickly as possible with only minor delays to some services continuing until lunchtime.'

A Network Rail spokesman said: 'Our engineers worked quickly and effectively to identify and fix the fault.'

Norwich South MP Simon Wright has written to both Greater Anglia and Network Rail to urge them to review their response to the problem, and do more to improve the reliability of the infrastructure.