Christmas is always a busy time for our railways, as a significant portion of the population plan to visit friends, family, or use it to get away from all that festive stuff. But the extra pressure on the railways can push the service - and its passengers - to the limit.
We’re lucky enough to be in a rail renaissance at the moment, but it’s easy to forget the downside of all that work and investment: short-term disruption. The railway companies are often between a rock and a hard place in choosing when the biggest disruptions should occur. The holiday period when travellers are primarily using services for leisure? Or during January when everyone is back in commuting-mode again? Touch choice. This pressure on the service isn’t anything new, as this little festive archive selection demonstrates.
These workers booked freight onto certain trains, and recorded the items needed transporting to their destination when they were unloaded from the train. Control room workers also dealt with problems along the track, such as with signals or points. This photograph was taken during the Second World War and, as an official photograph, needed to be passed by a censor. (Img ref: 10451590)
From all of us at the National Railway Museum, we wish our blog readers and visitors a very happy Christmas. And we also hope your trains deliver you on time and as planned.
And happy christmas to you all too, thanks for the archive images.
It looks as though several of the passengers in the last picture will need either coffee and aspirin or Irn-Bru in the morning…but what? No silly hats?
A happy Christmas to you, from a southern corner of the States–and thanks for not just this fine post but the long-term pleasures of the NRM blog.