UK travel news: Millions passengers face disruption amid heavy floods
Millions of travellers are expected to travel for Christmas today
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Your support makes all the difference.For the next two weeks, millions of rail passengers will find journeys across Britain difficult. They will be hit by a combination of Network Rail engineering work, strikes and nature.
UK airports will also be busy over the festive period, with millions of passengers expected to pass through on midwinter trips.
Several train lines are now back up and running.
All lines have reopened between Guildford and Haslemere / Redhill following Network Rail having successfully cleared a landslip. Trains are now able to run between Guildford and Haslemere / Redhill. Trains will however be running at a reduced speed.
Trains between Shrewsbury and Hereford are now running normally following flooding at Craven Arms, while normal service has resumed between Ascot and Reading following a road accident at a level crossing near Wokingham.
If you're in the East of England, keep an umbrella handy this evening. There are patches of rain and showers across the area tonight, according to the Met Office.
Passengers wishing to use GWR services from Paddington have been urged to complete their travel plans by today, Monday 23 December, because from Christmas Eve onwards the London terminus will be closed for engineering work until next weekend.
West Midlands Railway has told travellers between Nuneaton and Leamington Spa that there will be no service on the line after 3.30pm this afternoon.
Greater Anglia has cancelled a dozen services to far today, mainly because of staff shortage and signalling faults.
The train operator warns that the 10.02am from London to Ipswich and the converse return service and at 11.48am will have no toilet facilities – for a journey of over 70 minutes.
The Independent's Simon Calder reports:
Hundreds of trains across the rest of the UK have been cancelled or curtailed due to staff shortage.
TransPennine Express has cancelled 37 long-distance services so far, including many links between Scotland, Tyneside and Manchester airport.
The train operator, which is part of FirstGroup, has curtailed at least 10 others – for example terminating a Manchester-Glasgow train at Preston.
The train operator blames “resource availability”, which is believed mainly to involve a shortage of train crew.
Northern Rail, which covers much of the same territory from Cheshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire to southern Scotland, has so far cancelled 28 trains, including some long-distance services such as Leeds to Carlisle, York to Blackpool North and Dumfries to Newcastle.
Read more:
GWR, which cancelled dozens of inter-city expresses on Sunday because of staff shortage, is now stepping up Monday cancellations. The 9.15am from Penzance to London Paddington did not depart "due to a shortage fo train crew".
The boss of TransPennine Express has apologised to passengers.
Leo Goodwin, managing director for the train operator, said: “I am really sorry for the disruption to our customers journeys. I know what a busy time it is with people travelling during the festive period.
“We have had a number of issues to contend with; crew training caused by the late delivery of some of our new trains, a maintenance backlog and the implementation of a temporary timetable along one of our routes. This has unfortunately had a knock-on effect to other services. We are working really hard to sort this for our customers and as we introduce more new trains we should see an improvement to people’s journeys.”
Flooding is still causing issues for drivers today.
Highways England has highlighted a large amount of flooding in the Shoreham area of West Sussex.
If you're driving out of London today, pay attention to this very precise prediction from traffic data specialists Inrix.
At 2.45pm, Inrix predicts a wait of 69 minutes clockwise on the M25 between the M4 junction at Heathrow and Watford.
Elsewhere, heavy traffic is predicted between 10am and 3pm.
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