November 17th - Navigating the UK Rail Crisis: Strikes, Shortages, and Engineering Woes
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, I'm exploring the impending rail difficulties in the UK. As we brace for a difficult period, with strikes and operational challenges, rail journeys face numerous hurdles. Stay informed on what to expect and how best to adjust your travel plans.
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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. |
| 0:07.6 | It's Friday the 17th of November and I'm afraid going into the weekend I'm going to bring you |
| 0:12.6 | some tidings of not great news if you happen to be a rail passenger. |
| 0:18.4 | I've been assessing in the wake of the strike call yesterday by members of the |
| 0:23.7 | Azlef Trade Union, what the picture is looking like until the end of the year, and I'm afraid |
| 0:29.8 | it's not great. It's partly the train driver's strike plus overtime ban, but it's exacerbated by engineering work, long planned by |
| 0:41.1 | network rail, and also staff shortages. So if we can begin in, I guess, the chronological order, |
| 0:50.8 | this weekend, you'll find that the Leeds to London line is closed between Leeds and Doncaster |
| 0:56.5 | and there won't be any trains from Wakefield, Westgate. That's a mere beginning to the problems. |
| 1:02.8 | We'll see the following week when the East Coast main line, that's the link from London to Yorkshire, North East England, Scotland. |
| 1:12.6 | That's going to be closed completely between Doncaster and York for reliability upgrades. |
| 1:20.1 | There's going to be trains running via Leeds, but half the number of Anglo-Scottish trains will run, |
| 1:26.4 | and you can expect journeys to take longer. |
| 1:29.4 | For the rest of November on Sundays, the main line from Sheffield, Derby and Lester to London, St. Pancras is blocked for electrification work. |
| 1:41.1 | And there are diversions in place, but journeys will take longer. It's really going to be |
| 1:48.0 | though the first weekend of December when train driver strikes coincide with major engineering |
| 1:55.3 | work that it's going to get very messy. We'll see what two weeks from now, 1st of December, the first, |
| 2:02.7 | as left, overtime ban cancellations, because a number of train operators are reliant on |
| 2:08.6 | overtime to run their operations. The following day, Saturday, the 2nd of December, |
| 2:15.6 | you've got LNER, the main operator on the East Coast main line and East Midlands Railway targeted. |
| 2:23.3 | Those are probably going to run only a skeleton service, but it will still be possible to get between Yorkshire and London. |
| 2:32.9 | Now, the following day is when things get really tricky. Pretty chaotic for anybody |
... |
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