A beloved family pet was electrocuted and left lying between railway tracks for more than 30 hours, despite repeated pleas from its traumatised owner.

Janice Richards’ dog Barney ran though a hole under a fence onto the live rail in Epsom and received a fatal electric shock at about 6pm on Tuesday.

The Westie’s distraught family were only given back his dead body at 1.45am yesterday morning after repeatedly asking Network Rail to fetch him.

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Ms Richards’ partner Anthony White said her grief has been compounded by the delay and the fact the body was not retrieved as promised on Tuesday night.

Mr White said: "She keeps having an image of him lying there and that’s really distressing her. It was horrible to watch. It’s such a shame, he was such a lovely dog. He was a member of the family for 14 years."

He said Barney "vanished" out of his friend’s garden in Dirdene Gardens at 4.15pm and they spent two hours frantically searching for him.

At one point Barney went under a neighbour’s fence, and in desperation Mr White clambered over the top to search for him in the undergrowth.

He said: "I heard his footsteps on the track. I went down calling his name and saw him just before he touched the line. It was absolutely horrible to see." Mr White phoned the Network Rail emergency number and was told the dog would be retrieved after the last train that night. This did not happen.

On separate occasions, he was told an incident report was probably not handed over, trains ran through the night, the crew responsible were not on that section and the person responsible was on sick leave.

He said: "That’s four different excuses I have heard about. Something went wrong somewhere and caused a lot of distress. Janice’s imagination is running wild about what happened."

He has also asked Network Rail how often they check fences because he found a number of large gaps during his search for Barney. He said: "God forbid if a small kid goes down there. It’s a scary thought."

Manor Park resident Sheryl Richards, 49, who befriended the couple at Therfield School in Leatherhead, said commuters standing at Epsom train station and sitting on trains would have been upset had they known there was a dead dog on the tracks this week.

Ms Richards said: "The dog had been left there as all the trains kept going across, across, across. A lot of people sitting on the train would have said stop the train and get it off the line." She said Network Rail had failed to show compassion or "put their hands up" to what went wrong, adding: "I just can't believe it. If a child got onto the rails then what?"

A Network Rail spokesman said the dog fell between two live rails so the power for that section had to be turned off at night when train services were not running.

He said: "This was a distressing incident and anyone who has a dog will understand how upsetting it must have been.

"We tried to arrange for staff to come to the site and pick up the dog as soon as possible, however there were many different operational incidents ongoing that meant we couldn't get someone down there quickly enough.

"That said, we are looking in to why it took so long the following day and we understand Mr White's concern.

"With regard to our fencing, railway fencing is not designed to keep small animals out - it is there to denote our boundary and we use different types in different areas.

"Our neighbours have their own garden fences with our fencing behind that and in many cases they would be upset if we erected more intrusive fencing behind them (although it is sometimes unavoidable).

"We put up more secure fencing in areas with large numbers of people and children or where there are likely to be trespassers - however even that is not designed to stop animals digging underneath, it's designed to stop people climbing over the top."