TRAINS travelling through Worcester had an unscheduled stop after an unfortunate signalman got stuck in the toilet.

Passengers found themselves being held up at the Henwick signal box in St John’s on Wednesday afternoon after the man who was meant to be controlling the signals made an ill-fated dash to a Victorian outdoor toilet.

The disruption was publicly announced as “signalling problems”, but one mischievous web forum user lifted the lid on what really happened when he posted Network Rail’s official incident log.

It shows that trains were being forced to stop at Henwick after all contact was lost with the signalman.

The driver of the 15:13 Hereford to London service is then reported to have got out of his train and walked to the signalbox to see if he could sniff out the problem.

The next update simply states: “Local operations manager is on site and the signaller is stuck in the toilet.”

Network Rail apologised for the “unfortunate incident”.

“Much of the railway is still controlled from Victorian signal boxes, which often have outside loos,” a spokesman said. “Our plans to modernise the railway will see control moved to state-of-the-art regional control centres, where unfortunate incidents such as this simply wouldn’t be an issue. We apologise to anyone whose journey was delayed or disrupted.”