Electricity restored to York after major power cut closes offices and disrupts trains

More than 5,000 properties in central York had been affected after an underground cable was damaged, according to Northern Powergrid.

Power was restored to more than 4,000 properties yesterday evening, with the remainder in the YO1 postcode area reconnected by about 3am today.

A spokeswoman for Northern Powergrid said it wanted to thank all customers "for their patience during the power cut".

All council services have now returned to normal, after City of York Council was forced to close its West Offices and cancel non-essential meetings yesterday.

York Station has now re-opened after it was closed to stopping trains yesterday afternoon.

Reports of the power cut began to surface at about 3.45pm yesterday.

Northern Powergrid said that the "unexpected power cut" has affected 5,058 properties in the area. It later added: "Once our engineers started to fix the power cut we found that an underground cable needed to be repaired following 3rd party damage."

The outage had left numerous traffic signals out of action, with the council encouraging people to avoid all non-essential travel.

North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said that crews from York and Huntington attended a fire involving electrical cables in Toft Green shortly after 3pm.

However the force did not say whether the fire, which was out when crews arrived, was linked to the power cut.