Hundreds of thousands of passengers and freight users will benefit from one of the biggest Christmas and New Year investment programmes ever carried out on Britain’s rail network.
New station facilities, longer platforms, extra tracks, new junctions and thousands of pieces of new, more reliable equipment will be installed and delivered in a £150m investment programme to expand and improve the railway, beginning in the very early hours of Christmas Day, once the last trains have run.
Almost 500 individual projects will be carried out at 7,500 sites across Britain over the festive period, resulting in significant improvements across the network.
Network Rail has planned the work to take advantage of the relatively quiet time of the year on the railway, helping train operators minimise disruption. On average, around half the usual five million people travel by train each day during the Christmas period, and traditionally train services don’t run on Christmas Day.
Earlier this year, an independent review of how the rail industry plans and schedules major improvement work concluded that Christmas, Easter and bank holidays are the best times to carry out upgrades requiring major line closures, particularly in and around London, where the network is busiest and access for engineers is most difficult.
Most train services will be running over the holiday period, apart from on key bank holiday dates, but some services will be affected. Rail passengers across Britain are advised to leave plenty of time for their journey, wherever they are travelling this Christmas, and to check their journey plans in advance.
Barry Robinson, a track section manager who leads a team of 11 at Leeds station, is one of more than 20,000 members of Network Rail’s ‘Orange Army’ working over the Christmas and New Year period to deliver the Railway Upgrade Plan.
Among the major improvement projects, the Thameslink Programme will be continuing to rebuild the railway around London Bridge, while at Purley, near Croydon, a busy junction is being replaced to help double rail capacity at Gatwick by 2020 and treble it by 2035.
There will be major work on the tracks and signalling at London Bridge, and a new viaduct at Borough is being brought into use for the first time – all part of the scheme to rebuild London Bridge station and the surrounding railway to give passengers across the south east more trains to more destinations.
Both projects will mean nine days of changes to train services on lines from London Bridge, Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Victoria, from 1pm on Christmas Eve to Sunday 3 January 2016. From 8pm on Christmas Eve there will be no Southeastern trains from Charing Cross, Cannon Street, Waterloo East and London Bridge, with diversions to Victoria and Blackfriars, or New Cross.
There will also be significant changes to trains to Gatwick Airport, Brighton and stations along the south coast from late on Christmas Eve to Sunday, 3 January 2016. Trains will run – but some journeys may take longer than usual and the Gatwick Express service will be suspended.
Source: NetworkRail