Over Christmas Network Rail managed to inconvenience thousands of travellers – particularly around King’s Cross and Paddington stations in London. The reason was that the scheduled works that they’d planned for Christmas Day and Boxing Day massively overran and therefore people travelling on the 27th found that either they couldn’t, or it would be particularly hard to do so.
As ever, Network Rail schedules big pieces of work over holiday periods. Those are often either Bank Holidays or around Christmas.
Certainly there’s work regularly carried out at weekends – but never weekdays.
I’ve no doubt that the intention is to minimise the disruption to as small a number of people as possible. But of course, what that really means is: “Don’t disrupt commuters.” And it’s all very well for the Chief Executive not to take his bonus (shouldn’t a “bonus” be awarded for meeting a “target” of some kind?).
It seems to me that a certain kind of traveller is more likely to be affected by works at these times – the leisure traveller.
Because when you travel by rail you’re probably doing so for one of two reasons: for work, or for a leisure related reason such as visiting friends and family.
The former group is bigger, but they rarely get planned disruption – assuming that they mostly work Mondays to Fridays. Woe betide you if you happen to work on Sundays. The latter group, however, routinely get disrupted. Engineering works and our friend, the “bus replacement service” will always be at the weekend.
The problem is that for those who travel by rail at holiday periods, but don’t use rail for work, the rail service looks – and is – bad. That’s because those users are getting a second class service (perhaps Third would be more appropriate). If I was to only ever travel by rail at Christmas, I think I’d pretty much give up on trains very quickly believing the service to be unreliable and overcrowded.
We’re told that 4.5m commute but “only” 2.5m use the rail during holiday periods. But I suspect that there is only a limited overlap between these gaps. Living in a car-less household, I’m in that overlap, but I think I’m in the minority.
“If you’re not a commuter, you don’t matter,” seems to be the message.
Then there’s the overall planning. If you’re going to close Euston and King’s Cross, you’d better make sure that you get your work done on time. Because you’ve just shut off access between London and most of the midlands, the north and Scotland – Marylebone notwithstanding.
And suggesting that large numbers of passengers travel to commuter station Finsbury Park is just stupid. But of course there are no other ways to ferry passengers up to Stevenage or Peterborough to continue mainline routes north.
So how about carrying work out a bit more fairly? Don’t put all the pain on occasional leisure travellers, but share the load a bit.