Trains, coaches and Eurostar: Simon Calder gives Boxing Day travel update

It’s boxing day also known as Tuesday and for an awful lot of people well it’s a day they would love to travel around by public transport I know that because I’ve been talking to the big long-distance coach operators National Express flick bus Mega Bus they say they’re running pretty much a normal

Service today because the day after Christmas an awful lot of people want to travel if they are at London St panras International well you’re not going to get any trains on East Midlands railway from here to Leicester Derby Nottingham and Sheffield you’re not going to be traveling on southeastern Railway uh to

Dover and Canterbury and so on and you’re not going to be traveling on tlink either um to Brighton to Bedford to Cambridge you will though be able to travel to Paris to Amsterdam to Rotterdam to Brussels because that is because Eurostar is running a pretty normal service there’s 13 trains each way

Between the English and the French capitals there’s eight between here and Brussels with some of them extended to the Netherlands so there’s clearly a demand for travel but the attitude of the train operators most of them and the uh government is there won’t be any demand for travel on the 25th or the

26th of December now I have actually done a social media poll self- selecting on X formerly Twitter and so far out of 3,000 responses almost uh three out of five that’s 58% say that they would like to be able to travel by train on Boxing Day a

Pretty healthy 37% say no give the staff the day off of course there’s lots of Railway staff working on engineering works but it’s also worth noting that Scott rail is running more services on boxing day than it has done for decades uh they’ve got for example four trains

An hour between London and between Edinburgh and Glasgow um and there’s also some Services a few skeleton service around uh uh London you can get to gat you can get to staned airport from Tottenham hail you can get from Clapham Junction to Stratford on the overground but it is looking pretty thin

Mery rail around Liverpool does have a half decent service so once again if you want to travel long distances for instance to a big Premier League football match well you’re not going to be doing it on the train unless you’re going to a match in Continental Europe

The first train to depart anywhere in the UK for more than 24 hours left London Victoria just after 5am, destination Clapham Junction, East Croydon and Gatwick airport.

Soon afterwards, another link aimed at airline passengers started up – between Stansted airport in Essex and Tottenham Hale in north London.

The normal terminus in the capital, Liverpool Street, is closed for the day – along with most other major stations across the UK.

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