Paddington and Birmingham New Street to Close Over Christmas
Network Rail plans about £152m of engineering work, closing two major stations for several days and cutting some east coast and Great Eastern services.
Passengers on some of Great Britain's busiest rail lines face disruption from 10 days of Christmas engineering work. London Paddington and Birmingham New Street, the UK's busiest station outside the capital, will each shut for five days.
Network Rail says most routes will stay open. It calls the Christmas period, when services generally stop on 25 and 26 December, the best time for essential work. Engineers plan about £152m of work to improve reliability and capacity.
Paddington and Birmingham
The largest job is on the lines into Paddington, including replacing a junction near Slough. From 27 December to 4 January, most Great Western services to Wales and the west of England will start and finish at Reading. Some will divert around Oxford to London Euston. Intercity trains to the west of England and Wales are affected until January. Elizabeth line services west of Paddington and Heathrow Express will not resume after Christmas until 31 January.
New Street will close from the start of Christmas Eve until 29 December while overhead power supplies are replaced. No trains will stop or pass through, and rail replacement buses will serve the city centre.
East coast and East Anglia
The east coast mainline will be partly closed on Christmas Eve. Work at Doncaster means trains between London, north-east England and Scotland will be partly replaced by buses between Newark and York, adding two hours to journeys. The affected services are run by LNER and other operators.
The Great Eastern mainline out of London Liverpool Street will close for 10 days from Christmas Day for track replacement in east London. No Greater Anglia or Elizabeth line trains will run through the area, and there will be no direct trains from Norwich to London. Direct trains from the capital to parts of Essex and Norfolk will be cut for much of the festive period.
TransPennine services between Leeds and Manchester will be slowed for six weeks from Christmas Day because Huddersfield station will close.
Anit Chandarana, Network Rail's group director, system operator, said the company worked with train operators to keep services running on the busiest travel days where it could, and to offer alternative journeys. "We are sorry that some passengers will face disruption," he said. The days between Christmas and new year are "by far the quietest of the year", he said, and give the best chance to finish major projects such as the power supply upgrades at Birmingham and Paddington. He urged passengers to check their journeys before setting off.
Source: the Guardian