davidgillon | I Predict A Riot (Reply)

I'd completely forgotten that right in the middle of the travel chaos that will be the five day Christmas travel window, Network Rail will be shutting down London Kings Cross for six days. That's never popular, but with all the added Covid chaos funnelling everyone who traveled up on the 23rd/24th to travel back home on the 27th (no services on the 26th), this year the complaints are going to be absolutely epic.

As far as I can tell, you're supposed to travel down to Peterborough, then switch to East Midlands Trains to go to St Pancras rather than KX, but those East Midlands Trains are already going to be full of the two days worth of people coming back from wherever they run from (just checked - Leicester, aka Covid central, Derby and Sheffield). Just reserving a seat is going to be a major problem. If anything goes wrong and services are delayed, forcing mandatory reservations to fall through, then Covid restrictions will mean they're going to look half empty to all the LNER passengers being told there's no room for them. In the immortal words of the Kaiser Chiefs (particularly appropriate for services from Leeds), "I Predict a Riot".

Chances of successfully booking a wheelchair space on both an LNER service trying to squeeze two days worth of people into one, and an EMR service already full of two days worth of Leicester and Sheffield types, are probably about zero, . Particularly as there are normally 12 services an hour into KX, but I think I'm right in saying EMR only run 5 into St Pancras, and those are smaller trains.

So glad I've already ruled out traveling!

And Boris has got his excuses in early by setting up, sorry, putting up Sir Peter Hendy, boss of Network Rail, as the Christmas Travel Tsar. So the buck will stop with the man who planned the Kings Cross shutdown, not with the man who then decided we'd all have to travel back during it.

I notice LNER are advising people to stay longer and travel back later - have they actually read the Covid regs?