I was surprised yesterday, as I surfed the net in an unfocussed, cold-ridden sort of way, to read a headline in the East Anglian Daily Times that there were to be no weekend trains from the region to London for two months. It certainly came as news to me, and I passed through Colchester's main railway station only last week. I definitely don't remember noticing any signs saying Advance Warning: reductions to weekend services. It came as news to the BBC as well, who splashed it over the Essex section of their website. It is due to a £15 million rail upgrade, and Abellio Greater Anglia will be running a replacement bus service for the duration. The company's route managing director was quoted as saying that they would like to thank passengers in advance as it will mean some changes to their travel plans.
Well yes, it will, if you had been planning to travel between London and the eastern regions at a weekend between the end of January and the 22nd of March. If you had bought tickets for a play, or exhibition, or sports match, it would mean some changes to your travel plans, discovering that you were supposed to navigate your journey via a replacement bus service. Especially if the A12 is blocked, as it was this morning due to an overturned lorry near Chelmsford. Or if you had signed up for a museum study day, or Saturday morning music tuition at the Guildhall School of Music, as a friend's son used to do. Or if you had arranged any sort of social event requiring participants to travel between here and the great smoke. You might be quite surprised to discover at less than two weeks' notice that there weren't going to be any trains at weekends. And you might say, couldn't you have told us before?
I'm all in favour of the railway receiving £15 million of capital investment. They are going to renew thirty year old track at Colchester, and create more crossover points at Witham, which will help speed up the recovery time when there are train breakdowns or infrastructure failures, and renew signalling and overhead cables, which are old and creaky and often seem to be the cause of delays. All of that sounds a very good idea and quite a lot of work to get done for £15 million, but the planning process must have started months ago, and the putting out to tender, and announcing the winners, and lining up the sub-contractors and equipment and materials. So why give the travelling public so little advance warning of when the delays are likely, to give them at least half a chance to plan their diaries around the disruption?
Luckily I wasn't planning to do anything in London on any of the affected weekends, so my indignation is entirely on behalf of other people whose lives I imagine to be more action packed and eventful than mine. And luckily I can get away during the week, so I'm not left kicking myself that I missed my last chance to see Emily Carr at Dulwich or the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait exhibition before they close, unless I were to use up a day's holiday allowance and go on a weekday. I'm due to have lunch in town with an old university friend sometime around the end of the month, but she's a freelancer and we aren't limited to weekends. So I'll be fine. But I still think it's extraordinary to tell the best part of three counties' worth of people that as of twelve days' time they won't have any weekend trains for eight weeks, just like that.
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