RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Driving home for Christmas? This is the road to hell… As Planes, Trains And Automobiles meets On The Buses in Broken Britain
Basket Case Britain’s Christmas getaway is shaping up to be a remake of Planes, Trains And Automobiles, the glorious 1987 movie that features John Candy and Steve Martin being thwarted in their every attempt to get home for Thanksgiving.
Their flight from New York to Chicago is cancelled, then diverted to Wichita, Kansas. They buy train tickets, but the locomotive breaks down, stranding them in a field in the middle of nowhere.
They hop on a crowded bus to St Louis, where the airport is closed due to the severe weather. They manage to hire a car, which catches fire after they are nearly killed driving the wrong way down an Illinois freeway.
Eventually, they hitch a ride in the back of a refrigerated lorry. Sounds not unlike trying to get around Britain these days.
A few days ago, thousands of rail commuters were stuck for up to four hours in overcrowded carriages after an electric cable struck a train outside London’s Paddington station.
Officials assist passengers to get down from a train stuck on the Elizabeth line
In London, King’s Cross will be closed on Christmas Eve. So will Fenchurch Street and Paddington, which will stay shut until the following Wednesday — meaning no mainline rail link to Heathrow. If Miss Marple was planning to get the 4.50 From Paddington on Boxing Day, she can forget it
As well as singer James Blunt and Countdown’s Rachel Riley, half of Fleet Street’s finest seemed to be on board and were understandably anxious to vent their anger in the weekend’s newspapers. They’d all left early to beat yet another strike by engine drivers that evening, which explains why the carriages were packed to the gunwales.
Passengers were marooned, not allowed to get off, then eventually dumped at remote stations miles from their destinations, where they had to fork out a small fortune on shared taxis to make it home. Some black cabs sounded as if they resembled the last plane out of Kabul.
An unfortunate one-off, surely? Not as such. On Sunday, hundreds of people travelling on the East Coast Mainline were stranded after another overhead cable snapped and knocked out four rail lines on a 35-mile section between Grantham and Peterborough. The scenes at Grantham were described as utter ‘pandemonium’.
READ MORE: Elizabeth Line passengers who missed concerts, paid £195 for a taxi home and were fined up to £26 for ‘expired’ tickets after being trapped on trains for hours are still chasing refunds days after power failure chaos
The incident halted all services between London and Scotland, forcing passengers on to buses. It was the fourth time in a week a collapsed power line had hit Britain’s rail network, following similar problems in Nottinghamshire and at Manchester Piccadilly.
And the chaos is going to get even worse over the festive season.
In London, King’s Cross will be closed on Christmas Eve. So will Fenchurch Street and Paddington, which will stay shut until the following Wednesday — meaning no mainline rail link to Heathrow. If Miss Marple was planning to get the 4.50 From Paddington on Boxing Day, she can forget it.
Faced with a horror show on the railways, millions will take to the roads. The AA has warned of lengthy jams on at least seven motorways on Friday 22 and Saturday 23. So no change there then. Worst hit will be the M25, the M6, the M1, the M60 and M65. Just like every other day of the week, thanks to deserted roadworks, temporary traffic lights, lane restrictions and the introduction of ‘smart’ technology. The A40 doesn’t sound much better, either.
In his Sun column on Saturday, Jeremy Clarkson fumed that he had taken four and a half hours to drive 70 miles from his home in Oxfordshire to a meeting in West London. Later, it took him an hour in a black cab to travel to another meeting — just three miles away.
If you’re planning to get away by air, good luck with that. Two days ago, Gatwick went into meltdown, not for the first time, after an air traffic control failure forced the cancellation of dozens of flights. Oh, and the M23 — the gateway to Gatwick, was also closed for hours. These days, police treat every accident as a ‘crime scene’ and feel no responsibility to keep traffic flowing.
Faced with a horror show on the railways, millions will take to the roads. The AA has warned of lengthy jams on at least seven motorways on Friday 22 and Saturday 23. So no change there then
None of this surprises me. Britain’s entire transport network is broken — as much by design as by accident
None of this surprises me. Britain’s entire transport network is broken — as much by design as by accident. I can only speak for my neck of the woods, where Genghis Khan’s Transport for London has decided its job is to stop anyone going anywhere, ever.
I’ve been to three events in town over the past ten days and been late for every one, despite allowing plenty of extra time to get there because of TfL’s 20mph limits, empty cycle lanes, low traffic neighbourhoods, road closures and traffic lights every few hundred yards, which only change long enough to let through two or three cars before turning red again.
READ MORE: London descends into ‘absolute carnage’: Tourists, protesters and football fans swamp the city’s struggling transport and shoppers bring packed-out streets to a ‘total standstill’ after huge crowds travel to the capital in the run-up to Christmas
And for this they have the gall to charge anything up to £27.50 a day in congestion and ULEZ charges. This isn’t just my gripe. Virtually everyone else at these events has a similar tale to tell. Khan’s Net Zero, anti-car, pushbike fanatics are killing London.
It’s not only car-users, either. Long-serving licensed taxi drivers are abandoning their cabs in droves, having decided the game is no longer worth the candle. London bus drivers are said to be considering strike action, because the deliberately engineered congestion is making their job impossible.
One complained that on his route in South London, it now takes an hour to travel four stops, because of a recently installed cycle lane used by practically nobody. In Brentford, West London, a 16-year-old girl was run over by a bus which swerved to avoid roadworks creating yet another cycle lane.
I know from your emails and letters that things aren’t much better in other towns and cities, including Glasgow, Birmingham and Manchester.
In Leeds, the council has killed a bustling High Street by installing planters at the side of the road, restricting traffic, banning parking and deterring shoppers at the busiest time of the year.
Compared to the chaos created by the clowns who run Basket Case Britain’s transport network, John Candy and Steve Martin got off lightly. Over here Planes, Trains And Automobiles meets On The Buses. So you can forget Driving Home For Christmas.
This is The Road To Hell.
Councils are always pleading poverty when it comes to mending the roads and pavements, but they seem to have plenty of cash for LTNs, cycle lanes (see elsewhere) and, especially, speed humps.
Waltham Forest Council, in East London, has spent a small fortune on installing ‘vibrating’ humps on a mile-length stretch of main road in Chingford to enforce a new 20mph limit.
Local residents claim that every time a heavy vehicle passes over them, their homes ‘rattle and shake’, causing cracks in walls and ceilings and furniture to wobble.
One man said he is finding it difficult to sleep. Another said the ‘constant jerking’ made his wife, who suffers from arthritis, cry in agony.
Bus drivers, too, complain that they are suffering back and neck pain because of the juddering effect of navigating the humps.
Suburban roads everywhere now resemble crazy golf courses. Although I don’t know why they bother splashing out on humps and other expensive, engineered ‘traffic-calming’ measures. Thanks to the multiple, unfilled potholes every few yards, it’s already too dangerous to drive at more than 20mph in most places without wrecking your suspension or bursting a tyre.
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