Britain’s lack of trains on Boxing Day is shameful |
Among all the perfidies of public transport in Britain (a nation that can build a £40 billion railway based on the premise that the outskirts of Acton counts as a ‘central London’ terminus), perhaps the most ludicrous of all is this. On 26 December, a day when millions of us need to move about, no trains run.
HS2 makes me angry. But I’ve spent every festive period of my adult life feeling positively dyspeptic about the meek acceptance with which we tolerate the almost complete lack of trains departing or arriving at any UK railway stations on Boxing Day.
We are an absolute, solitary outlier in this regard. Even in Italy, where Christmas stretches lazily from Christmas Eve until Epiphany, there’s a skeleton timetable on 26 December. German, French, Spanish and Swiss rolling stock trundle along serenely on this day. Yet we long ago descended into a kind of post-Yuletide paralysis from which we show no signs of waking.
It didn’t used to be this way. Up until 1983 you could get from Glasgow to Edinburgh and London to Brighton by train on Boxing Day. But there hasn’t been a loco from London to Liverpool or Manchester on Boxing Day since 1980, and nothing on the east coast has left the marshalling yards to traverse the mainline up to Newcastle since 1976.
These latter two dates should ring a bell, chiming as they do with the wheezing........