December 30th - What Travel Will Look Like In The Opening Weeks Of 2022
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2021
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Southern Railways has announced today that because of staff illness and isolation periods, it will not have any services travelling into London Victoria until the 10th January. I take a look at the announcement and how it's a problem repeated across the country at the moment due to Omicron's spread.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to the Penultimate Independent Travel Podcast for 2021. |
| 0:11.5 | And as you may be able to tell, I am somewhere out and about. Specifically, I am at Victoria Station. One of the leading rail hubs in the UK. |
| 0:25.6 | I'm on the eastern side, which means that I can see a whole range of destinations, Ashford, Beckenham, Brumley, Chatham, Doverham, Favisham and Maidstone East. |
| 0:41.3 | What more could you want? Well, perhaps some trains from the western part of the station, |
| 0:48.3 | which is where I am heading now. |
| 0:51.3 | It's a beautiful station, by the way, lovely arched roof, lots of original Victorian |
| 0:57.9 | stonework on display and well the further I get towards platforms 10 onwards the fewer people I can |
| 1:08.4 | see although I can see a number of gentlemen, all men, it must be said, |
| 1:13.6 | just ahead wearing bright orange uniforms. Of course they are network rail engineering staff. |
| 1:23.6 | It's no surprise that this part of Victoria Station, which is the hub for southern trains to South London to Surrey, Sussex, and also the Gatwick Express Service, should be quiet because we always knew there was going to be a closure by network rail. |
| 1:47.6 | Up to the 4th of January, trains due to restart then, but they are not restarting because, |
| 1:56.4 | well, there are not enough staff. In something which I've simply never seen before, Southern has |
| 2:05.0 | announced suddenly that it is going to keep Victoria, or at least the western half of it, |
| 2:14.1 | out of use, right up to the 10th of January when services should start again. |
| 2:22.3 | They're doing that, they say, because they have not got enough staff. I guess they feel that if they're running a half-decent service in and out of their other hub, which is London Bridge, about three miles away from here, |
| 2:36.9 | then they can carry on for a bit longer and concentrate their resources. |
| 2:41.6 | They are also decided to axe some links completely. |
| 2:47.1 | So, for example, trains from Clapham Junction to to Milton Keynes from east Croydon via |
| 2:54.4 | Forest Hill to London Bridge generally there will be alternatives available but two stations |
| 3:03.7 | Battersea Park and ones worth common will we'll simply have no trains at all. |
| 3:10.3 | If you don't happen to commute from the area south of London, you might think, well, that's tough luck, but. They have updated the train of January. |
| 3:30.0 | Right, I was just pausing there. They have updated the recorded announcement to tell people, don't even think about catching a train from here up to and |
... |
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