Rail track weekend works

nltrainer
Traveller
1404 comments

Posted 13 years ago

This is mainly meant as a warning to those unknown to this fenomenon, which is pretty British and hardly known in many other European countries.
of course-any railway has to get renewed, rebuilt or whatever from time to time. On the continent they often can do that on 1 track and keep the trains on the other-with only delays.
In the UK they tend to do it different-also because of labour laws and because of much more narrow space around the tracks. Thus on almost any weekend there are works spread out all over the country. This means trains are rerouted-or more often terminated-anyone has to go out-there will be buses waiting (or not-then you wait till they come) and you have more chance to see the countryside till another station where you board another train. Needless to say this will extend journey-times a lot.
Also peculiar British is that on sundays-even when there are no works, trains have much different timings/schedules and often even slower running. If you use a tranplanner, take care to use the exact day to avoid other nasty surprises.