November 23rd - How train strikes could stop Santa Claus coming to town
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Traveling home for Christmas by rail? Good luck. Festive engineering works mean two key London stations, Paddington and King's Cross, are closed on Christmas Eve. So unless you travel by 23 December to/from Yorkshire, northeast England and Scotland (King's Cross) or the West of England/South Wales (Paddington), you could be scuppered.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Cawler. It's Thursday the 23rd of November and I'm in a pretty busy central London. |
| 0:12.4 | I'm talking today about how actually the 23rd of December, so one month from today, is i think going to be extremely busy on the trains |
| 0:26.0 | leaving london and indeed heading in for london um that's going to be a saturday of course it's also |
| 0:33.3 | going to be a day when well if you don't get where you need to be on that day you might not get there at all because if you're going to be a day when, well, if you don't get where you need to be on that day, you might not get |
| 0:39.7 | there at all. Because if you depend on rail, as I do, you don't have access to a car, and you |
| 0:47.7 | don't want to take the very good long distance coaches, then, well, your options start closing down |
| 0:53.3 | from the 23rd of December. |
| 0:56.3 | In particular, what you are going to see is, well, on the East Coast main line, |
| 1:03.0 | that's the, I guess, the flagship line of the UK from Scotland, from North East England, |
| 1:08.8 | from Yorkshire to London, |
| 1:16.1 | that's going to be completely closed at its southern terminus on the 24th of December. |
| 1:19.2 | That means there won't be any trains on Christmas Eve. |
| 1:22.9 | You will get LNER, the main operator. |
| 1:28.2 | They'll start or end in Peterborough or St. Neots in Cambridgeshire. |
| 1:31.5 | Yes, not a place that's particularly familiar to me, but there is going to be a bus link from there to Bedford, |
| 1:34.6 | from which you'll be able to get to London on Thameslink. |
| 1:41.0 | And, well, ultimately, it's going to be very, very tricky to get anywhere that you need to be on that route |
| 1:48.3 | that's on Christmas Eve so therefore the pressure on the 23rd of December is going to be fairly high |
| 1:54.1 | the other really serious problem for people trying to get in or out of London is going to be |
| 2:00.6 | and this stretches right through |
| 2:02.6 | from the 24th to the 27th of December is on great western railways because the normal hub for those |
| 2:14.1 | which of course is at London Paddington, that is going to be completely closed. |
... |
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