Other European transport systems can handle Christmas – why not ours?

Travel misery: it’s as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe and Mariah Carey. And this decade has been a classic. In 2010, you might recall, Heathrow was caught in a snowstorm. Though but a light dusting by Scandinavian standards, Europe’s busiest airport was effectively shut down for several days during the highest-pressure week of the winter.

Three years later, it was Gatwick’s turn to disappoint. On Christmas Eve 2013, the River Mole (hardly a waterway of Amazonian proportions) somehow leaked into the mains supply for the North Terminal, disabling the electronic systems. Hundreds of flights were cancelled or severely delayed. Several thousand passengers enjoyed 25 December not with their families, on the beach or ski slope, but in hotels in the Crawley area.

By 2016, The Independent headline read: “BA strikes – 40,000 journeys in jeopardy as cabin crew plan Christmas walkout.” The strike was ruled unlawful by the High Court – by which time it had already caused plenty of festive anxiety among travellers.

Last Christmas, TV crews were once again camped out at Gatwick when the world’s busiest runway was shut down by someone flying an unauthorised drone, cancelling 1,000 flights tearing up 150,000 travel plans.

So on the morning of Friday 20 December, I was not entirely amazed to find myself aboard the Gatwick Express.

The surprise this year was that the flying part of the Gatwick operation was performing relatively well. The problem was on the ground, where biblical floods have beset the area just south of Crawley.

Rail networks have been flooded, with many services cancelled. Anyone hoping to circumvent the rail chaos by car will find the M23 practically a lake.

As Christmas approaches, things can only get worse on the railways. Eurostar is already cancelling trains up to 28 December because of the continuing strikes in France in protest against pension reforms.

But that is a mere continental sideshow compared with the disruption planned for Britain’s train travellers.

London Paddington is once again the worst-hit station of the season. From Christmas Eve, GWR trains that usually run from the terminus to the west of England, Cotswolds and south Wales will start and end in Reading. South Western Railway would normally provide an alternative link from Waterloo to Reading – were it not for the month-long RMT strike.

The rail industry insists that Christmas and New Year is the optimum time to do the heavy lifting on the network. “Significantly fewer people travel [by train] over Christmas,” says Andrew Haines, chief executive of Network Rail. In reality, however, the absence of Christmas services is more a commercial decision than an engineering one.

Certainly, Monday-to-Friday commuters will all but vanish, but there is, I speculate, plenty of suppressed demand: Megabus and National Express plan more long-distance buses than ever on 25 December, while Boxing Day for those coach firms is almost a routine day.

In continental cities, public transport functions more or less as usual on Christmas Day. In Germany, two express trains will run each hour between Hamburg and Berlin, with near-normal services across the rest of the country.

In the Netherlands, the tram from Amsterdam to the Rijksmuseum is open for the 9am-5pm stint every day of the year.

By contrast, the UK rail network closes completely on Christmas Day, and hardly anything runs on Boxing Day – just a handful of operators making the most of sports fans and shoppers.

A first step to normalising travel at Christmas will be for the government to compel train firms to run on Boxing Day – unless engineering dictates otherwise. This, of course, is the biggest obstacle to a year-round British transport system: the fragility of our transport infrastructure. We have a Victorian rail network that has been chopped up by politicians and is now propped up by constant maintenance. Our major airports – notably Gatwick and Heathrow – have virtually no resilience. So when things start to go “Tango Uniform,” as they say in the travel industry, there is little that can be done.

We could decide to build new runways and railway lines, but instead we choose to muddle along. In the depths of winter, when it’s so important that transport runs perfectly, it rarely does.

Yours,

Simon Calder

Travel correspondent