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 death throes and subsequent post-mortem examinations of both the decaying Harold Wilson and stymied James Callaghan governments. Back then, in the smoke-filled meeting rooms of the National Union of Railwaymen, it became apparent that Boxing Day wasn’t a statutory public holiday as far as rail agreements went (though of course it is in pretty much every other context). So, gradually, union muscle won out to the point where, by the time of Margaret Thatcher’s first re-election, Boxing Day had become a guaranteed day off.
Privatisation in 1991 saw franchises inherit what the old printing presses of Fleet Street dubbed ‘old Spanish customs’: a sobriquet for recalcitrantly restrictive work practises. But, by this point, it had become cemented in the public consciousness that running trains on Boxing Day was just not something we did. We developed collective amnesia at a speed faster than most InterCity 125s and forgot that the system was ever different.
From then until the present day, if you want to visit family, get to an airport, reach a football match or return from one of those expensive ‘two-night festive hotel breaks’, your options are: drive, plead for a lift or gamble on finding a taxi driver. Now probably isn’t the time to also point out that, even on Christmas Day itself, skeleton train services run in almost all European countries. Most Brits aren’t overly vexed about the lack of trains on Christmas Day. But a Boxing Day shutdown is a different matter entirely, and one that has nothing to do with begrudging railway staff a proper festive break.
If you want to visit family, get to an airport, reach a football match or return from one of those expensive ‘two-night festive hotel breaks’, your options are: drive, plead for a lift or gamble on finding a taxi driver
To work on 26 December would make railway employees no different to anyone working in hospitals, restaurants, other forms of public transport (in London both buses and Tubes run on the 26th), high street stores and, lest we forget, the railway engineers that are carrying out all the repair and upgrading works that, apparently, cannot be done at any other time.
We need to stop swallowing this particular excuse. Because if the rest of Europe can make their railways function on Boxing Day and, presumably, still carry out infrastructure works, then we can too. Anyway, the preponderance of works that overrun until January imply that running trains over tracks, rather than repairing them, on one more day of the holidays probably won’t make the inevitable delays much worse than they already are.
Half a century ago, one of the reasons put forward by British Rail for many of the remaining Boxing Day trains being taken out of service was that there weren’t enough people using them. Ludicrously, this is an argument still sometimes deployed now, despite modern Britain on the day after Christmas having long ceased to be a land of quiet parlour games followed by an ITV James Bond movie and leftover sprouts.
When modest railway services have been reintroduced, demand instantly follows. Liverpool (hardly a city noted as having a history of resistance to strong unionisation) has in recent years run a limited local service on Boxing Day, and there are trains to a couple of the capital’s airports too. Merseyrail is continuing its ‘experimental’ Boxing Day service this year, as are the Stansted and Heathrow Express services, suggesting that if you run trains, people will use them.
But the above are exceptionally rare outliers. When it comes to something approaching a nationwide service on Boxing Day, it seems nobody wants to be the first to break the spell about allowing people to travel on a day when pretty much the entire nation wants to get out of the house.
It’s a damning testament to how we are governed by those who admire progress, provided it doesn’t actually require anyone to change anything. Until that attitude is obviated, my Boxing Day temper will remain heated while the rails, as always, will lie as cold as another unwanted turkey sandwich.
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