Furious football fans face EIGHT hour drives to away games and nightmare journeys due to rail shutdown and engineering works
Travel havoc as works close large parts of rail network while Premier League & Championship Boxing Day games kick off
BUNGLING Network Rail and Tory transport chiefs left just one top Boxing Day football fixture serviced by trains for travelling away fans.
Of the 18 Premiership and Championship matches today, just Watford vs Crystal Palace have rail connections due to massive engineering works up and down the country.
Most of Britain’s transport network will be at a standstill after Network Rail signed off 200 controversial Christmas repairs at a cost of £103million.
It’s the second year running that festive travellers have been blighted by rail chaos.
Last year more than 115,000 train passengers were caught up in "widespread confusion and frustration" when Network Rail’s disastrous Christmas repairs overran.
A report by the Office of Rail Regulation said the delay led to "unacceptable" service levels in the days after Christmas, but the Government have allowed similar repairs to go head again this year.
Network Rail chief executive Mark Carne defended the decision, claiming “the reality is this is the best time of the year for us to do this sort of huge engineering project because the numbers of people travelling by train is about half of what it is on a normal weekend or a normal day.”
But the transport chaos has prompted uproar from fans and Labour.
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West Ham away supporters are facing an eight hour round trip to Swansea, while fans of Norwich City are facing a nearly six hour round trip by road to Reading to support their team.
West Brom fans face a five hours on the road to attend their showdown with Arsenal, as do Sunderland fans travelling to Manchester United.
Only Crystal Palace fans travelling to north London to face Watford will be able to travel by train.
Labour's Shadow Secretary for Transport blasted the Tory "hypocrisy" for attacking Labour over the issue but then not taking action in office.
Andy McDonald hit out: “In opposition the Tories attacked the Boxing Day rail shutdown.
“They’ve now had more than six years to do something about it but haven’t.”
And he heaped the blame directly at Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, who is already under fire for his handling of the Southern Rail strike.
Mr McDonald went on: "Tory ministers' handling of the Boxing Day rail standstill is making it much harder for football fans to support their teams away from home and much harder for families and friends to visit one another this Christmas break.”
"Their lack of action, even despite the chaos of previous years, gives the impression they don't really care about it at all.”
In 2008 when the Conservatives were out of power the party claimed: “Boxing Day is a traditional sporting fixture across the country for many sports, not just football.
They added: “huge numbers of fans will be heading to games” but “will be given no choice but to get into their cars, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere and put up with potentially eye-watering levels of congestion because the railways remain shut."
Rail operators which are not running services on Boxing Day include Arriva Trains Wales, c2C, CrossCountry, East Midlands, Grand Central, Great Northern, Great Western, London Midland, Northern Rail, South West, Thameslink, TransPennine Express and Virgin.