December 28th - Scenes of Chaos and Confusion
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 28 December 2023
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thousands of people have been affected by the unexpected travel issues across the UK during the holidays.
What has caused these scenes of chaos and confusion? I go over the biggest problems and how it has impacted travelers with long wait times and the possible risks of not making their destinations on time.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It is Thursday the 28th of December |
| 0:09.8 | and I'm afraid once again I am at a railway station where I'm having to report scenes of some chaos and confusion. |
| 0:18.5 | I'm at London Paddington Station which has been closed for the past four days. |
| 0:23.6 | That's as a result of the problems that we, oh, planned engineering work, no actual |
| 0:30.6 | unexpected problems. For the HS2 link, it closed at midnight on Saturday before Christmas and was due to reopen today. It did |
| 0:41.1 | actually open on schedule and trains initially were running normally but unfortunately there was |
| 0:48.0 | a fatality on the line between here and Reading. As a result of that all all services were suspended. The workaround, as very sadly we are used to, |
| 1:00.0 | is to travel between Reading and London on the South Western Railway link, which runs into London Waterloo. |
| 1:10.0 | And that, of course, course is getting very very crowded because |
| 1:13.6 | normally there would be tens of thousands of people travelling on the normal line here |
| 1:19.6 | from Paddington towards the west of England and South Wales. |
| 1:23.6 | Passengers to Oxford can go to London Mellibone station and travel from there. |
| 1:29.3 | Elsewhere on the railways, well, yesterday Wednesday was utter mayhem. |
| 1:35.3 | So the main problems were Storm Gerrit, in particular in Scotland. |
| 1:41.3 | Many ScotRail trains suspended from the afternoon onwards, lines reopening gradually |
| 1:48.1 | but only after a daylight inspection and since it's not sunrise in the north of Scotland |
| 1:52.9 | till nine o'clock that is providing problems as well. Then goodness this was completely out of the blue as so many things are this particular |
| 2:04.5 | festive season. We had the problem of a signalling project north of London St Pancras International |
| 2:13.6 | on the Midland Main Line which runs to Leicester Derby, Sheffield and also the Thameslink line |
| 2:20.8 | from Bedford, Luton through central London to Gatwick Airport and Brighton. Signalling project |
| 2:26.3 | was completed. They switched it back on on Wednesday morning and it didn't work. And that caused |
| 2:32.6 | absolute mayhem.hem problems continuing on Thursday |
... |
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