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People have been told to consider avoiding travelling by train at Christmas because of planned rail engineering works.

Transport secretary Grant Shapps said on Tuesday that people should "look very carefully" at their festive travel plans.

A number of engineering works are scheduled between Christmas and New Year, while coronavirus restrictions to ensure social distancing mean even less capacity on trains.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Shapps said: "I would appeal to people to look very carefully at their Christmas travel plans.

"It may well be the case that very, very long planned engineering works are scheduled. A lot of them take 18 months or two years to plan."

In a separate interview with BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, he said people should contemplate not travelling by train at Christmas because of the rail network?s "limitations".

He said: "We have got to understand there are limitations to the network caused by, for example, things like the need on some trains to pre-book tickets at this time, in order to prevent overcrowding.

"So we are going to be appealing to people to look very carefully at the transport route they take and of course even making a choice about whether they travel at all.

?It is the reality of the situation we?re in; we will try to do everything we can with the network to make it as good as possible, but I think it is worth people being aware that busy times of travel is a problem."

Signal gantry replacement and station regeneration work at Bristol Temple Meads.

Trains between London Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads will start/terminate at Bath Spa instead.

Services between Cardiff Central and Portsmouth Harbour will be diverted and won?t call at Bristol Temple Meads.

Services from the South West will terminate at Bristol Temple Meads; services from the Midlands, North of England or Scotland will terminate at Bristol Parkway.

Buses replace trains between:
Bristol Temple Meads and Bath Spa
Bristol Temple Meads and Bristol Parkway
Bristol Temple Meads and Severn Beach

Following the announcement of the five day Christmas travel period, we thought it would be helpful to let you know about our Christmas and New Year services.
 
Services will run normally on 23 December. On Christmas Eve late afternoon and evening services will be amended to prepare for our usual closure on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.  Heathrow Express trains will run on Boxing Day.
 
There are no planned improvement works in this area affecting our services between Christmas and New Year. London Paddington remains open and services to London will operate normally throughout.   
 
If you are travelling via Bristol Temple Meads or Gatwick Airport there are some local changes from Sunday 27 December which can be checked on our Christmas travel page www.gwr.com/travel-updates/planned-engineering/christmas
 
As with all current journeys, we are asking customers to please check their journey before travel on www.gwr.com and book in advance reserving a seat, and for advice about travelling with confidence there is more information on https://www.gwr.com/safety

Please feel free to pass this information on, and we will be happy to help if there are any questions or queries.

Fears of Christmas travel anarchy grow: Government may run extra trains and suspend engineering work as Britain hits the railways for the Christmas bubble
- Ministers are preparing urgent plans to limit travel chaos over Christmas period
- Boris Johnson announced this week three households could mix over five days
- People will be allowed to travel home between December 23 and December 27
- But networks are already running at a fifth capacity due to the pandemic
- The government have appointed a Christmas transport tsar to tackle the issue
-Sir Peter Hendy, the former Olympic Tube boss, has been handed the role

Now that we are in the 21st Century, perhaps we could run public transport on the 25th and 26th December like most civilised countries.

Be allowed to travel? What control freakery, just travel when and to where you want to in the UK, no one should be able to legally stop you.

Trains are going to be longer, this probably means using mothballed stock. If they are clever they will make a train so long that it will stretch from its departure station to its destination and then people will be able to walk to their destination. The other way of putting people off is to increase the fare, which they will probably do anyway. I have never understood why they don't just sell enough tickets of seats available it works in other countries. Suspend maintenance great idea then the infrastructure will collapse and trains will not run when they are required. Leaves on the line, flooding or the wrong kind of snow will ruin any plans.

So after telling everybody to not move about then they want to make it easier for everybody to move about all over the place. Could anybody possibly be confused by this?

A good illustration of the phrase, "The left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing"!

The dates also need to change for relaxed laws to travel. Im sure alot of people hate travelling back on a Sunday and/or Sunday travel restrictions on the bank Holiday Monday. It needs to be extended atleast to the Tuesday! Furthermore the engineering works need to be frozen and moved in order for people to travel more freely.

Every year pandemic or not they close mainline routes over christmas so why appoint somebody bloody stupid grant shapps I dont think could tell the difference between a bike and a truck

More wasted money. Governments have never bothered before so I don't see the difference now.

Because if Covid rules are broken (ie distancing) there could be sued.

Super spreader event, or will these full trains be diverted to the inoculation camps.

The DfT (It's for transport not of transport now) as part of the franchising agreement tells the franchisees what the service levels they are to provide are. The franchisees may try to improve that if economically they think it will work. The DfT also control what rolling stock a franchisee can use and any new stock has to be approved by DfT so although you may think that the franchisees do what they want they are very much restricted by the government. Most of this is now irrelevant as franchises were suspended since covid and the government has been in total control effectively nationalizing the railway so if you don't like it blame the government.

We need a new direction and leadership,, Please bring back the teletubbies!

Interesting that in a rail forum, 50% of those responding say that they never or rarely travel by train at Christmas.

While the vast majority of the rail network will be unaffected by engineering works over the Christmas and New Year period, some upgrade projects are taking place, including:

Significant works on the East Coast Main Line as part of the East Coast Upgrade, which will improve reliability for passengers and boost connectivity between London, the North of England and Scotland. The work is now scheduled to start later than originally planned to ensure extra Christmas Eve services can run out of King?s Cross.

Upgrades on the West Coast Main Line that will now be completed earlier than planned ? on 27 December ? to enable a full Sunday service to operate from 10am rather than midday, making it easier for passengers to travel home from their Christmas bubbles.

Remodelling and roof repair work at Bristol Temple Meads which will see amended timetables in operation from London Paddington, with some trains at peak times not running at all between 28 December and 1 January. From 28 December until 11 January, timetables will be amended because platforms 3-6 at Bristol Temple Meads will be out of use.

Switches and crosses renewals at London Waterloo that will provide a more reliable railway for passengers in future. Platforms 12-20 at Waterloo will be closed between 27 December and 3 January, with a reduced timetable in place between Waterloo and Clapham Junction. There will also be a reduced service between Woking, Basingstoke, Guildford, Portsmouth, Southampton, Weymouth and Salisbury over the festive period.

Maintenance and track renewal works at Charing Cross/Cannon Street to London Bridge and New Cross to improve passenger safety and the journey experience. Southeastern services will operate from London Bridge, and there will be a bus replacement service between Lewisham and Hayes from 27-29 December. Between 1-3 January buses will replace trains between Lewisham and Hayes and between Lewisham and Charlton via New Cross.

Vital maintenance to the Great Eastern Main Line around Colchester will improve the reliability of services in the region. Engineering work will be taking place between 25 December and 3 January with rail replacement bus services running on several routes.

And, yes it IS ironic that on our rail forum the majority of our members avoid trains over Christmas, even in a normal year.

I'm not sure the word avoid is appropriate when asking about their habits during a normal year?  It might well be that the railways don't offer a product over Christmas that forum members might otherwise choose to use the rest of the year.  Somebody who commutes during a normal working week might have no need to travel over Christmas if their family lives down the road.  They are not avoiding using the railways, it is just that they have no need to.

On Christmas Eve, late afternoon and evening services will be amended as we prepare for the two-day shutdown which applies across most of the UK national rail network.

There will be no Great Western Railway train services on either Friday 25 or Saturday 26 December. However, there will be Heathrow Express trains running between London Paddington and Heathrow Airport on Boxing Day.

Trains on New Year?s Eve and on New Year?s Day will be significantly amended to cater for anticipated demand.

Rail improvement work will be taking place in the Bristol area as well as near Gatwick Airport and between Par and Newquay.

Please note there is also rail improvement work affecting South Western Railway services between London Waterloo and Clapham Junction as well as Basingstoke and Salisbury.