It's Boxing Day, also known as Tuesday. And for an awful lot of people, well, it's a day they would love to travel around by public transport. I know that because I've been talking to the big long distance coach operators, National Express, Flix Bus, Mega Bus. They say they're running pretty much a normal service today because the day after Christmas

an awful lot of people want to travel. If they are at London St. Pancras International, well,

you're not going to get any trains on East Midlands Railway from here to Leicester, Derby,

Nottingham and Sheffield. You're not going to be travelling

on South Eastern Railway to Dover and Canterbury and so on, and you're not going to be

travelling on Thameslink either, to Brighton, to Bedford, to Cambridge. You will, though, be able

to travel to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Rotterdam, to Brussels,

because that is because Eurostar is running a pretty normal service. There's 13 trains each way

between the English and the French capitals. There's eight between here and Brussels, with some of them

extended to the Netherlands. So there's clearly a demand for travel, but the attitude of the train

operators, most of them, and the government is there won't be any demand for travel on the 25th or

the 26th of December.

Now, I have actually done a social media poll, self-selecting on X, formerly Twitter.

And so far, out of 3,000 responses, almost 3 out of 5, that's 58%, say that they would like to be able to travel by train on Boxing Day.

A pretty healthy 37% say, no, give the staff the day off.

Of course, there's lots of railway staff working on engineering works.

But it's also worth noting that Scott Rail is running more services on Boxing Day

than it has done for decades. They've got, for example, four trains an hour between London and

Edinburgh and Glasgow. And there's also some services, a skeleton service around London. You can get to Gatwick,

you can get to Stansett Airport from Tottenham Hale. You can get from Clapham Junction to Stratford

on the overground, but it is looking pretty thin. Mersey Rail around Liverpool does have a

half decent service.

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