Ten Days of Christmas Rail Works Close Paddington and New Street
Engineering works over the holidays will shut London Paddington, disrupting intercity services to the west of England and Wales into January, and close Birmingham New Street for five days. The east coast main line is partly closed on Christmas Eve. Network Rail says most routes stay open and expects to carry out about £152m of work.
If you are planning Christmas travel on the Great Western or through Birmingham, book around this now rather than in December. New Street is the busiest station in the country outside London and loses five days; Paddington’s closure affects services towards the west of England and Wales and the knock-on runs into January, with the largest single job replacing a junction near Slough. Passengers travelling between London, the north-east and Scotland face a part closure of the east coast main line on Christmas Eve, which is among the worst possible days for it. The operator’s defence is a reasonable one and worth stating fairly: scheduled services generally stop on 25 and 26 December anyway, so the holiday remains the least disruptive window for essential work, and the £152m is going on reliability and capacity rather than cosmetics. The counter-argument is simply that “least disruptive” still means ten days across two of the busiest corridors in Britain, announced with seven weeks’ notice.