Christmas travel
Calm or chaos? Government juggles engineering works with a five-day travel break from COVID-19 restrictions.
THE Government announced a “comprehensive plan for the Christmas travel window” in early December, promising enhanced rail services as well as “postponing and accelerating rail engineering works”.
Major Christmas engineering projects take years of planning. Changing them at short notice is disruptive and expensive, and merely pushes a problem to a busier time of year.
But after announcing a fiveday break from COVID-19 rules between December 23-27, ministers feared a greater rush for road and rail travel than usual this Christmas, with the break coinciding with several major blockades - including at King’s Cross and Waterloo (95% of the network will still be running).
“Postponing rail upgrade works will ease congestion, minimise disruption and allow extra services to run,” said Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps.
But very little has actually been postponed - just a few tweaks to the plans have been announced.
As one well-placed source explained: “Network Rail has been hauled in by DfT and asked to justify every single piece of engineering work - why it needs to happen this year, and what the implications would be if it didn’t happen.
“The Secretary of State has got very nervous about this, but his officials are comfortable with what we are saying, even if he isn’t.
“All that negative newspaper coverage stops some people from travelling. Just the threat of a problem puts them off. Tell them the journey will be awful, and they won’t make that journey. This year that isn’t actually necessary - they’d already decided to stay at home.”
Transport Focus Chief Executive Anthony Smith said: “I think we are more likely to be talking about ghost trains, carrying almost no passengers. The work we’ve done indicates there is not going to be a massive rush.
“There are bound to be some pinch points - people decanting at Stevenage off the East Coast and getting onto GTR services, for example. But on the whole, the sense is that the capacity will be sufficient.
“Leaving the bulk of the engineering work as planned makes total sense. If you delay it, it just puts the problem off until a time when there will be more passengers.”
Robert Nisbet, nations and regions director at the Rail Delivery Group, pointed out that only onetwentieth of the railway will be affected by engineering closures.
“Compared with previous years, this is a small one in terms of engineering,” he explained.
“Contractors have committed people and resources. To cancel these, to flick the switch, would cost a lot of money. We have made changes where we can - running longer Avanti trains to Liverpool, for example, and delaying the start of East Coast works until after service on Christmas Eve.
“And the 27th, as we have to keep reminding people, is a Sunday, so we have a Sunday service, engineering work already planned, trains running at
50% capacity because of social distancing, and it’s the end of the window of restrictions. You can see why there is nervousness. It is difficult to predict what the likely passenger levels will be.”
Great Western Railway spokesman Dan Panes said:
“Reservations are about 20% of where they were for the same period last year, so we expect to be able to cope with predicted demand, even with social distancing precautions in place.”
Mark Hopwood, interim managing director of South Western Railway, told RAIL:
“We are not planning to change anything. We have strengthened some of our plans - staffing at stations and some extra buses going in. The DfT might take the credit for us running longer trains, but they were always in the plan anyway.
“We think numbers will be well down. Most of our business is day trips into London. Those are diminished - no theatres, no pantomimes, no winter wonderland. We will still carry people, but not on the scale of the inter-city operators.”
Hopwood added: “We seem to have the same conversations at Christmas every year. We are never going to get a pat on the back for shutting the railway. But if we try to put commuters on buses at a different time of year, it just doesn’t work. Most buses are tied up with school contracts - it is very difficult to book large numbers