Dover queues – live: Roads ‘extremely busy’ as passengers urged to bring supplies

Travellers have shared their tales of woe from train stations around the country, as many faced long delays due to planned engineering works.

Sophie Earish, a student from Wembley Park, said her normal 20-minute Tube journey to St Pancras took an hour due to closures on the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines.

When she arrived at St Pancras Station, on her way to visit her partner in Loughborough, the 26-year-old said she then had to queue for an hour and a half for a train north.

“I didn’t realise Euston was closed this weekend causing this mess,” she told PA.

“The queues to get to trains on the platforms were chaotic... why do they think it’s acceptable to do engineering works over the Easter weekend? It’s ridiculous, it seems to be the same every year.”

London Euston Station is closed over the Easter weekend due to engineering works between the travel hub and Milton Keynes Central.

Rail passengers travelling for the Easter weekend have said boarding a train in London was “like the last train out of Saigon” on Good Friday.

Images on social media showed thousands queueing at St Pancras Station in the capital amid high volumes of travellers and service disruption, including the closure of Euston Station from April 7 to 10 for track improvements and service reductions on a number of Tube lines.

Ruaridh Pritchard, a writer from the capital, was delayed for three hours on his way to Stockport for an Easter weekend with friends and described “arguing and pushing” in the crowds.

“St Pancras was mayhem, limited crowd control,” the 33-year-old told the PA news agency.

“Staff are doing the best they could under the circumstances. Lots of people arguing and pushing - it was like the last train out of Saigon.

“(It has) kind of put a dampener on the weekend, I’ve lost half a day of Easter.”

Hundreds of thousands of people were let down by HM Passport Office (HMPO) over the last year, with “unacceptable” delays in receiving their passports, a report from the Public Accounts Committee has concluded.

The scathing document said that HMPO “lacks ambition” to perform better, raises doubts around digital transformation, and suggests there may be knock-on effects for years to come.

Although 95 per cent of customers between January and September 2022 received their travel documents within the advertised 10 weeks, around 360,000 people were forced to wait longer.

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Travellers caught up in a “chaotic” thousands-strong crowd at a London train station have likened the “mayhem” sparked by widespread Easter rail disruption to boarding “the last train out of Saigon”.

Network Rail is using the bank holiday weekend, as “the lowest period of passenger traffic”, to carry out more than 600 engineering works across the country.

Andy Gregory has a rundown of today’s travel chaos:

And now to our travel correspondent Simon Calder, who recounts his Flixbus bus odyssey from Victoria Coach Station, London to Cafe L’Hovercraft, Calais.

I was booked to travel on the 9am Flixbus departure from London to Brussels. The previous Friday, tens of thousands of coach passengers had spent many hours stuck in queues at the Port of Dover. And Good Friday promised to be another tricky day.

Service 815 was leaving from Victoria Coach Station, the UK coach industry’s mother ship. As I approached, ferry companies and the Port of Dover were warning online of waits of two to three hours on what was expected to be the busiest day of the Easter weekend.

Read Simon’s latest dispatch here:

Traffic at the Port of Dover was flowing “well” as of 8pm this evening, according to the latest update from port officials.

It follows reports of snaking traffic queues, with P&O Ferries and operator DFDS warning of delays of between 60 and 90 minutes to the port’s entrance.

London Heathrow is once again one of the 10 busiest airports in the world after previously falling down the list as a result of the pandemic.

Having tumbled to number 54 in the global rankings after around two years of closure, Heathrow has now jumped back up to 8th place.

This was the biggest movement recorded by any airport, with the London hub seeing 61.6 million passengers pass through in 2022 – a 217 per cent leap on 2021 figures.

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