Why our railways often seem to be in such chaos over Christmas

At a rail yard near Milton Keynes, a group of men in orange outfits are making final checks on huge slabs of railway track, preparing them so that they are ready to be installed over Christmas and New Year.

At a time when many commuters stop work to enjoy celebrations with friends and family, rail bosses get massive engineering projects and upgrades done.

So, those orange-clad workers are out in force.

Carl Foy has been on duty for roughly 20 of the 27 Christmases in his career. This year will add another to the tally – with his two grown-up sons, who are also rail workers, out there with him. Some friends think he’s mad for doing it. But Carl says it’s just accepted as part of the job.

“We bring in a few mince pieces, the site offices might have a bit of tinsel around,” he says. “We make it as enjoyable as we can and just crack on with the work.”

The £26m project they’ll be working on this Christmas is one of the biggest scheduled across the country: Hanslope Junction, a crucial part of the West Coast Main Line, which is wearing out.

Each day almost 500 trains use it and an increasing number of faults are causing delays, the repercussions of which ripple throughout the network. Now, the whole thing, comprising four tracks, is to be re-laid.

It’s a giant and complicated jigsaw puzzle of 130 separate track panels – not something that can be done when trains are roaring up and down. So, it will leave passengers with no trains between Milton Keynes and Rugby and Milton Keynes and Northampton not just late on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day (as is usually the case) but up until the morning of 5 January. It means no direct trains linking London Euston with north-west England and Scotland for 11 full days.

It’s a similar story up and down the country, with other projects, too, like updating signalling technology. In all, 5% of the rail network will be shut down over the festive period – part of a £160m engineering project organised by Network Rail.

Many of these are huge jobs, not routine maintenance, that have been long planned, with funding allocated as part of Network Rail’s five-yearly business plans.

The question is – with millions travelling across the country over the festive season, causing so much inconvenience to many, why schedule it now? And is it all a case of sensible planning – or an indicator of something amiss with Britain’s rail network?

Chatting to passengers at London Euston station weeks before Christmas, it doesn’t take long to find some who are affected.

“My sister-in-law is coming to visit and she’s had real trouble trying to get a train,” one woman tells me. “Every train’s got two or three changes.” Unable to find a direct service, and with a longer journey time, she changed the dates of her visit to avoid the disruption.

Another passenger, heading for the North of England, is wondering whether to get the train at all. “It’s easier for me to drive rather than run the risk of getting there and not being able to get back.

“Obviously there are a lot less commuters over the Christmas period, I can see why they do it at this time of year, but it’s not great if you’re trying to get home… to see your friends and family.”

The debate over why works should be scheduled over Christmas is a complex one: on the one hand, train bosses calculate that the effects on people travelling to work will be minimal, given how many businesses shut for Christmas.

“It’s the quietest time of year for the railway and our customers, so we squeeze in as much work then to disrupt as few people as possible,” explains Jake Kelly, a route managing director at Network Rail.

But on the other hand it risks causing a “bottleneck”, argues Gareth Dennis, a rail engineer, campaigner, and author of How the Railways Will Fix the Future.

He sees another problem too: “It’s extremely expensive.

“All those workers, rightly, are getting paid way over the normal rate they would because they are sacrificing extremely important family and personal time working long hours over that period.”

Mr Kelly acknowledges there is a price: “It’s always a difficult choice, and there is a cost of doing work over Christmas when families across the UK are celebrating.”

But, he says, it’s a difficult trade-off between minimising disruption for customers versus cost.

When compared with other European countries, Britain is fairly unique (with the exception of Italy) in its “particularly intensive approach”, as Mr Dennis puts it, to doing this sort of rail work at Easter and Christmas.

This is partly because rail networks in other countries, like Germany and France, are laid out differently.

“Where the country’s more of a square shape, their rail network isn’t kind of north-south, it’s much more of a grid,” he explains. “So you can dodge around things more easily… and they can spread their engineering work out a bit more.”

The high level of passenger demand in Britain also poses a challenge. “It has one of the most intensively used railways in Europe – [it] gets tired, gets worn out”.

The West Coast Main Line does not have the capacity to run any more trains, while the East Coast Mainline’s new December timetable will make it much busier, he says.

But even this is only part of the story. Another factor that contributes to the network creaking in places is a legacy of underinvestment.

Stewart Palmer spent 38 years working on the railway, including spells at Network Rail’s predecessor Railtrack, and as the managing director of what was then called South West Trains.

In the past – as far back as the post-war period – the money wasn’t always there to do the work that was needed and for decades there was a tendency, he says, “towards mend and make do”.

The fact there is so much work to do now “has emerged over a very long history”.

Engineering works have frequently been postponed, he adds. One way of keeping the railway running safely until work can be done has been by imposing speed restrictions on some parts of the track.

But the legacy of a Hertfordshire rail crash that happened 25 years ago is a reminder of the importance of ensuring that deteriorated rail is replaced in good time.

On a Tuesday in October 2000, a train carrying 12 staff and 170 passengers came to a catastrophic halt outside the town of Hatfield. Four of the nine carriages were derailed and three more were flung over on their side, killing four people.

An official investigation into the crash revealed a series of errors by rail bosses and engineers. One of those causes, highlighted by an inquiry, was a failure to identify and repair or replace the rapidly deteriorating rail.

“This caused us to do loads of engineering investigations, but it also resulted in renewing an enormous amount of rail all at once in a very fast period of time,” Mr Dennis explains.

Then there is the impact of the weather. Network Rail has been clear that climate change poses a significant challenge. “Extreme weather caused by climate change is on the rise. This will affect how safely and reliably we can run the railway,” it says on its website.

These extreme weather events not only lead to equipment failures but affect how quickly things wear out too.

William Powrie, a professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Southampton, says climate change creates a long list of hazards for the railways. Take the hot summers – these heat railway tracks beyond temperatures they can handle, sometimes causing them to buckle, he says. High winds can also damage overhead lines.

He’s particularly worried about what he calls the “paperclip” effect.

Many British railways are built on clay soil that shrinks in the summer as vegetation sucks out water, and expands in the winter. But this expand-and-shrink cycle is becoming more extreme, he warns.

“It’s a bit like if you get a paperclip and bend it forwards, bend it backwards. It’s OK for a bit – but eventually it will break.”

It’s not only tracks that need looking after, but embankments and drainage along railway lines. In November, a train travelling from Glasgow to London on the West Coast Main Line derailed near Carlisle after hitting a landslip, leaving four people injured.

An independent investigation into the cause of a train derailment will look into a raft of potential issues. The Rail Accident Investigation Branch said its preliminary examination found a drainage channel was “unable to accommodate the volume of water which was present”.

Network Rail say they are aware of climate change-related hazards – and they are moving money around to cope with it. Their latest five-year business plan earmarked £2.8bn to help deal with extreme weather and climate change.

Amid all of this, the organisation has committed to make cost savings of £3.9bn. Bosses have been clear about the financial pressures they face.

“Like many businesses, we continue to feel the impact of inflation and rising supply chain costs,” Andrew Haines, Network Rail’s then-chief executive said in an update this summer.

This means “tough choices”, including “prioritising assets that are located on busier parts of the network,” he said.

But the regulator, the Office of Rail and Road, has warned that constrained funding forcing Network Rail to spend “less on renewals and more on life-extending repairs and maintenance” could mean “more asset failures and therefore disruption to train services in the long-term”, plus potential higher costs in the future.

Of course, for millions of passengers this Christmas, their main priority will simply be getting home. People are being warned to check and plan ahead before they travel – a message as reliably present at this time of year as Christmas trees or mulled wine.

So, can railway passengers around the country expect a smoother Christmas next year?

Unlikely, argues Jake Kelly of Network Rail. A project like Hanslope Junction near Milton Keynes can be years in the planning.

With “a pipeline that is three or four years long”, he says “we’re already starting to finalise [plans] for next year”.

Additional reporting: Florence Freeman.

Top image credit: Getty Images.

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