Christmas rail works are essential this year to keep trains running throughout 2021
This year, the Christmas engineering works being undertaken by the railway industry have received extensive media coverage.
Unfortunately, the time period for these works coincides with the window when coronavirus restrictions will be loosened for five days (23–27 December).
This has led to some frustration, with questions about why the work needs to take place when it does, or whether it can be rescheduled in light of Covid.
These concerns are understandable, but misguided. In fact, much of the work is essential in getting ready for when passengers return post-coronavirus.
Of course, the government must seek to ensure that the public can travel safely during the festive period and that those who need to use our rail network are able to do so. However, we should keep a few things in mind.
First, the vast majority of the rail network — 95 per cent — will not be impacted at all by Christmas works, and will run as usual. Most of the engineering work which does happen during the festive period will take place over Christmas Day and Boxing Day, when few or no services are running at all.
In fact, train services of note have not run on these days for the last 50 years, after they were stopped due to a lack of demand.
Over the other days of the break, train operators are saying that reported demand is likely to be around 30 per cent of normal levels, far lower than that seen in previous years.
Second, the five per cent of the network which does need work to take place over Christmas consists of around 400 projects involving some 1,750 possessions (where pieces of infrastructure are removed from service while engineering works take place). These projects are worth under £140m — that equates to less than 1.5 per cent of Network Rail’s average annual budget for the year.
So the public should be assured that, where there is work taking place, it really needs to, to ensure that part of the railway is safe for use the rest of the year.
Contrary to some of the recent stories, work on the railway cannot simply be rescheduled easily. While some work like that at Kings Cross or Bletchley has been moved by a day or so — to allow greater travel around Christmas — the railway is a complex piece of infrastructure and works are planned well in advance to ensure that they can be conducted safely and without wider ripple effects to the rest of the network.
Postponing work can potentially ultimately cause greater disruption for passengers for even longer periods later in the year.
For example, if engineering due to be undertaken at King’s Cross now were significantly postponed, that would have knock-on impacts on plans for future work in February. Work being undertaken at Bristol Temple Meads would, if delayed, have an impact on work in summer 2021. Replanning increases costs significantly, and puts a strain on resources which are needed to work on future timetable activity, to ensure the long-term performance of the network.
To those saying that work should have been brought forward to the national lockdown last spring, there is a simple answer: much of it was.
During that first lockdown, over £550m was spent on the railways to improve and upgrade the network. At one point, rail investment accounted for a quarter of the entire country’s capital investment activity, with work being sped up to take advantage of lower traffic levels. Much of this work will ensure that our railways are ready for when passengers return in 2021.
We should be grateful that this Christmas, while we are spending time with our families, railway teams across the country will be working hard, as they have done throughout this whole challenging year, to renew and build a world-class railway.
The railway industry, working with Network Rail during the forthcoming festive break, will ensure that the network continues to run for the benefit of all of us in all parts of the UK, for the rest of the coming year.
Main image credit: Getty