Two breakdowns delay Edinburgh train for 12 hours HUNDREDS of passengers were stuck on a train between London and Edinburgh for nearly 12 hours yesterday after it broke down twice. Some 350 travellers on the 11am East Coast service from King's Cross were first held up less than an hour into their journey when overhead power lines came down near Peterborough. However, a rescue locomotive drafted in to haul the train north broke down itself at Dunbar, with passengers eventually reaching Edinburgh at 10:41pm - more than seven hours late. One passenger said by the time they reached Dunbar, there were just 12 bottles of water left to go round. The fault, which brought down wires over about half-a-mile across all four tracks, delayed a total of more than 30,000 passengers, with nearly 90 East Coast trains cancelled. Delays continued today while engineers completed repairs. Network Rail said the overhead wires fault appeared to be "an inherent design issue that was not detectable." Train operator East Coast expressed anger at the third such major incident on the east coast main line in eight months. Managing director Karen Boswell said: "This incident has been extremely frustrating for our customers, and I want to say sorry to everyone whose journey was delayed, or who was inconvenienced. This is the latest in a series of incidents related to the infrastructure on the line - and currently, overhead line failures are the biggest cause of delays. An East Coast spokesman said: "The most severely delayed train, the 11:00 London King's Cross to Edinburgh service, was passing Tallington at the moment when the overhead power lines failed. A rescue locomotive was attached to the train, and as soon as Network Rail cleared the line, the service resumed its journey north. Unfortunately the hired-in locomotive also failed at Dunbar, and a replacement had to be brought from Edinburgh to enable the train to complete its journey, some 7 hours and 20 minutes behind schedule. Network Rail said the fault had been caused by a weakness in joints in the overhead wires. It said this had also been the cause of damage to some two miles of wires near Retford in Nottinghamshire in August. However, the firm said it had not caused a previous incident, involving about half a mile of wires, in Cambridgeshire in February. A spokesman said other parts of the route would be checked, but this would not involve disruption to passengers.