Rail chiefs blasted for festive chaos

RAIL bosses kept quiet about the growing engineering crisis that spiralled out of control at Christmas to cause chaos for thousands of train travellers, a report has revealed.

The litany of mistakes and ‘truly barmy’ decisions by ‘abysmal’ managers has been laid bare for the first time by industry experts ahead of Network Rail’s own official report into the fiasco at King’s Cross and Paddington stations, to be published next week.

The magazine Rail has pieced together a timetable of what caused a simple and ‘piffling’ 24-hour engineering project near London’s King Cross station to massively overrun during the Christmas break.

Problems included too few drivers with too few hours, which caused a 16-hour delay to ‘an otherwise standard’ 24 hour repair project. But rail bosses ‘kept schtum’ about the true scale of the deepening crisis at Holloway Bank tunnels near King’s Cross hoping it would sort itself out.

Services on the East Coast mainline to and from Scotland were cancelled, delayed and diverted. There was dangerous overcrowding at Finsbury Park station, which was unable to cope after rail bosses told trains to operate from there instead.

Network Rail chief executive Mark Carne and infrastructure projects boss Francis Paonessa – who is compiling the official NR report – were both on holiday at the height of the crisis.

A Network Rail spokesman said: ‘Clearly Rail has managed to piece together some of the timeline and events that led to the overrun at King’s Cross on the 27th but they do not have the full picture or full understanding.’