The last bank holiday weekend until Christmas will see wide-ranging travel disruption in England and Wales. Many travellers will find their journeys made more challenging by planned engineering work on the railways and the sheer volume of traffic on the roads.
Three key intercity lines to and from London will be hit by closures and diversions due to Network Rail projects. Engineers will be working on both the East and West Coast main lines, as well as the Great Western route through the Severn Tunnel.
In addition, the RAC predicts heavier bank holiday traffic than at any time since it started recording data in 2015. Delays are expected on roads serving coastal resorts and on routes for the Leeds and Reading music festivals.
But airline passengers are unlikely to see a repeat of the chaos on August bank holiday Monday 2023, when the Nats air-traffic control computer system – and its back-up – shut down in response to an unusual flight plan. The air navigation service says its systems are more resilient.
Once the bank holiday weekend is over, strikes will resume. Train drivers belonging to the Aslef union and working for LNER will walk out on Saturday 31 August and on every weekend day until 10 November in a dispute over management behaviour.
At London Heathrow, 650 officers working for UK Border Force will stop work from 31 August to 3 September in a dispute over rosters.
These are the key bank holiday travel challenges.
Rail
Journeys on routes linking London with Yorkshire, northeast England and Scotland will be slower and more complicated from Saturday evening, 24 August, to Monday morning, 26 August. Many people heading south from the Edinburgh Festival will be affected.
Work on the East Coast main line to enhance digital signalling will close the tracks between the capital and Peterborough. The last northbound intercity train from London King’s Cross station on Saturday will be the 9pm to Newcastle. The terminus will then close for 35 hours to long-distance passengers until 8am on bank holiday Monday.
On Sunday a reduced service will run south as far as St Neots in Cambridgeshire, from where rail-replacement buses will operate to and from Bedford. Thameslink trains from here run frequently to London St Pancras, adjacent to King’s Cross.
The main operator on the line, LNER, says: “We have sourced…
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