THERE was chaos yet again on the North Berwick to Edinburgh rail line this morning, when a large number of commuters were once again left stranded at Musselburgh.

The 8.13am service was cancelled and commuters who did manage to get onboard the 8.22am train then found themselves having to take replacement buses from Waverley to Haymarket, due to a broken down train which had developed a brake fault.

READ MORE: Dozens of commuters left stranded by overcrowded train

Many commuters were unable to board the 8.22am at Musselburgh, and some took to Twitter to express their frustration.

While others had earlier warned fellow commuters they could face difficulties getting to work after the earlier train was cancelled.

READ MORE: Railway line 'at breaking point'

A ScotRail spokesman said: "Due to a broken down train between Haymarket and Edinburgh, services on all routes through these stations have been subject to disruption.

"The train was on the move by around 8.30am; however, there has been a knock-on delays to services.

"We apologise to customers affected by this incident and ask - if delayed by 30 minutes or more as a result of this problem - to retain their tickets to claim a refund through our Delay Repay scheme."

ScotRail informed customers on Twitter that "residual disruption" on the Waverley to Haymarket line could be ongoing until 1.30pm - five hours after the train was moved.

Now, a rail chief has apologised for the chaos caused to commuters due to this morning's breakdown, pledging: "We will do everything we can to learn from it."

Phil Verster, managing director of the ScotRail Alliance, added: "In all my many years working in the railway, this was as disruptive an incident as I have seen."

A train suffered a major failure at 7.02am this morning at a main junction near Princes Street Gardens. The location of the incident meant that all lines were blocked coming in and out of Edinburgh.

The type of failure that occurred resulted in the train’s brakes locking, meaning that the unit could not be restarted or moved manually. Engineers had to attend to physically split the train into two parts before they could be moved.

The incident hit East Lothian services and affected services from Glasgow on both the High Level and Low Level services, the Borders, Fife, Dunblane, Perth and Dundee.

Mr Verster said: "I want to apologise for the disruption our customers experienced today. The breakdown this morning was the worst type of train failure, in the worst part of our network at the worst possible time.

"We worked hard to get information to our customers as quickly as possible – through social media, our website and app and at our stations. While a huge amount of effort went into this, it is clear that some areas worked better than others.

"I know that what people want when disruption happens is to have access to good quality information. That is why we will be having a thorough review of this incident to see what worked and what didn’t and, crucially, to understand what we need to change or do differently."

Commuters being left stranded by the 8.22 train at Musselburgh is a regular problem and has happened frequently in recent weeks.

In spite of this, signs at the station advising commuters of how many seats are likely to be free on peak-time trains were recently changed to suggest there were likely to be "many seats available" on all services (see pic below) - much to commuters' surprise and ridicule.

East Lothian Courier:

READ MORE: Anger as ScotRail says 'many seats' available on all peak-time trains at Musselburgh... as commuters are again turned away