COMMUTERS have expressed their frustrations at the “ongoing and regular” issues on the c2c line after a train was cancelled due to a shortage of drivers.

On Friday morning, a peak service train was cancelled due to “short notice driver unavailability”.

This wasn’t the first issue of the week, after services were “severely impacted” on Tuesday morning by a power outage.

Commuters have expressed their frustrations at the issues faced this week and say the service is becoming “more and more unreliable”.

This comes after problems with the c2c app, smartcard tickets, and also faults with ticket machines.

John Strutton, 61, from Basildon, said: “The service disruption has caused misery for thousands of c2c customers for weeks.

“Starting with the app stopping working, and the smartcard. Then you only have one if not two at best ticket offices open at Basildon. The machines break down regularly, it is happening more and more.

“The frequency of the failures is appalling. Then the icing on the cake was the train cancellations this morning due to lack of drivers, which is just crazy.

“It is impossible for people to get back into the office when the trains are so unreliable.”

Chris Fox, 33, from Westcliff, added: “It is just a pain coming into work late, through no fault of my own.

“The lack of communication when there is a cancellation like this morning is just massive.

“I see massive queues every single day that stretch out of the door of the station too.”

In response to the commuters frustrations, a spokesman for c2c said: “We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers travelling on the c2c route on Tuesday morning. Our services were severely impacted by a power outage in Upminster, which meant all signalling was lost in that area.

“Network Rail dispatched a team of engineers, and the power was restored at approximately 9am. Unfortunately, this restricted the number of trains we could operate but trains were able to run normally in time for the peak afternoon service.

“This morning’s cancellation to the 07:45 service to Fenchurch Street was due to short notice driver unavailability. Again, we apologise to any of our customers that were inconvenienced by this train cancellation.

“We know customers have also recently experienced issues with the c2c app. This fault was resolved on Tuesday night and customers can now load Smartcard purchases directly on the app - they can choose any station to do this.

“We have also experienced issues with loading Smartcard tickets at the gates. We would like to reassure customers this has also been resolved and we are monitoring the issue carefully.”