Woodford - Epping Power Discharged During Evening Rush Hour!

The train appears to have become stalled over points. Could be any number of reasons - shoes missing, a fault with one or more units on the train, current rail(s) out of alignment, or even just the train stopped in an unlucky spot for some reason. It appears the decision was taken to use jumper leads to get it moving again, which nowadays requires the juice taken off - at least for the process of laying the leads onto the current rails. The traction current section is Loughhton-Epping, therefore running as far as Debden would not be feasible, apart from perhaps with the opening of section switches, which probably wasn't considered worthwhile for what should only be a short duration.

I imagine most of the delay was getting suitably trained, qualified, licensed and familiar staff there. Leads is not something which can be done by either train operator or station staff. It has to be either a trains qualified manager (who in turn needs to be trained on the stock), or the ERU. The point about stock training is quite important, as on more recent trains (certainly on 95 & 96 stock, not sure about 92 stock) it isn't quite as simple as pushing the leads into the receptacle box. On 95 stock it's quite common for the box and its associated switch to get broken in the process if the staff don't know exactly what they're doing, which will then cause further problems. One also has to carefully choose which box will be used on the train - for example using the box on the middle motor cars on a 95 stock is likely in practice to be a timewaste!