Great Western Coffee Shop

Both BBC and Sky are reporting that difficulties with be encountered due to rail strikes on Boxing day.
Don't think there has been a very limited rail service on boxing since approx 1988.

There has not been on the GW ToC territory, other ToC's have been running limited services.

The biggest loss to the Rail Industry is the amount of engineering work that has been cancelled, most of this work has taken a year or two in the planning.  Quite a lot of these improvements will be lost due to the way CP6 funding works the DfT / Treasury do not allow the funds to be rolled over to the next financial year. 

Yes, I would agree too - the lack of passenger trains today (Boxing Day) is almost entirely due to the annual near total closure of the network on this day every year. It has nothing to do with striking workers or government and their agents not meeting their demands.  In past years, many of us on this forum have bemoaned the virtually zero train service on 26th December and that at a time when Messrs Whelan, Lynch, Harper and Sunak (or their predecessors) have not been in a hot war.

Where today's strike is or will have an effect as I understand it is in the engineering department, where major upgrades and replacements that require a closure to normal trains will not / are not going ahead.

The media is "always" looking for a good story that 'motivates' their readers, and at a quiet time of year such as this will make a mountain out of a molehill.   If they do so in a way that will rally their followers, they'll do so and I thinks I see strong elements of that.

For the record - from The Daily Mail (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11572933/NO-trains-tomorrow-rail-union-calls-Boxing-Day-strike-forcing-thousands-make-alternative-plans.html)


Ah - but the headline says millions have been "forced onto the roads for Christmas" but that the Boxing Day lack of passenger trains will bring chaos for thousands.  And that choice of different orders of magnitude for the rail trouble as a whole and for the direct effect of today's strike suggests to me that Matt Powell knows he's stretching a story!  He's whipping up public outrage - outrage may be due over the the whole strike situation, but really not (IMHO) on the effect on passengers today when most of us would not have been provided with trains anyway, even if the rail workers had been totally at work if called.

GWR are warning about the impact that strike/industrial action will be having tomorrow too.....