U.K. suffers from widespread Christmas travel disruption, railways cancelled

Monday, December 23, 2019

Travellers across the U.K. and beyond are suffering widespread disruption as Britain’s rail network prepares for its annual Christmas shut down.

GWR which runs services between London Paddington and south Wales and the west of England.

By Monday 23 December the travellers had been urged to complete their travel plans as from Chritsmas Eve onwards the London terminus will be closed because of the engineering work until next weekend.

Across the network passengers on the GWR services are being hit by the widespread cancellations while the train operator blamed shortage of train crew on their High Speed Inter-City routes.

Mainly services to and from Cardiff and Bristol Temple Meads was cancelled and initially GWR said that 23 trains were cancelled. As per the train operator there was a severe shortage of train crew on their High Speed Inter-City routes.

Now the number has gone up and atleast 42 are axed from the schedule to serve a wide range of destinations and 10 more will be curtailed which will stop or start short of their intended stations.

Some passengers will not reach their destinations until after midnight as the last train of the day from London to Worcester will run only as far as Oxford and buses will ply for the rest of their journey.

Last weekend the train operator who introduced the new radical schedules said that while they were  attempting to run as many trains as they can, ad hoc alterations to services are likely to occur throughout the day, leading into the evening towards the end of the service later tonight.

Chances are that some of the last trains might also get affected and passengers were advised to travel as early as they can in order to avoid inconvenience to their journeys as possible.

Across much of the Britain’s network the rail workers’ employment contracts sill in force made Sunday work voluntary.

Dozens of local services in northwest England was cancelled by Northern Rail. The blame was on engineering work  and not being able to match the employees availability as per the agreement.

On Sunday, services have been suspended for the entire day between Manchester Piccadilly and Crewe, Liverpool Lime Street and Blackpool North.

There will be reduced services on the other lines like Manchester-Buxton and the passengers stated that they don’t cancel services and routes with cancelled Sunday service were chosen  to minimise the impact on the customers.

At the London, Waterloo about half the usual Sunday service to southwest London, Surrey, Berkshire, Hampshire and beyond is running.

Over the role of guards the members of the RMT union employed by South Western Railway are on a strike and  the stoppage has entered the third week. It will probably continue to early January and end just as the rail fares rise in Britain.

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