Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts
Get Simon Calder’s Travel email
Get Simon Calder’s Travel email
Severe weather continues to make travel in January a lottery. At London Heathrow, 36 arrivals and departures have been cancelled after air-traffic controllers asked for a reduction in the number of flights on Monday. Strong winds are predicted to reduce the “flow rate” of aircraft movements at Europe’s busiest airport.
British Airways has so far cancelled 26 flights to and from London Heathrow, including domestic links to and from Belfast City and Edinburgh. European flights serving Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Zurich are also grounded.
British Airways has more than half the slots at Heathrow and is always impacted most heavily by air-traffic control restrictions. But other airlines including Aer Lingus, Iberia, KLM and Lufthansa have cancelled flights to and from their hubs. An estimated 5,000 passengers are affected.
Under air passengers’ rights rules, travellers whose flights are cancelled are entitled to be flown to their destination as soon as possible on any airline, and to be provided with meals and hotels until they get there.
All the routes are served by multiple daily departures, and the airlines will aim to rebook passengers on adjacent flights.
Rail passengers face another day of disruption. Transport for Wales has issued a “Do Not Travel” warning for the Heart of Wales line between Swansea and Crewe.
In England, fallen trees have halted rush-hour trains south of Guildford in Surrey and north of Hastings in East Sussex.
The Great Western Railway between London Paddington and Plymouth is flooded between Reading and Taunton. National Rail warns: “Trains may be delayed by up to 20 minutes, cancelled or diverted. Disruption is expected until 11.30am.”
No trains are running between Manchester Victoria and Blackburn due to flooding at Darwen.
Elsewhere in northern Britain, rail services are gradually returning to normal. At London King’s Cross, the first train to Edinburgh since Thursday departed on schedule at 5.48am. All Anglo-Scottish trains were cancelled on Friday because of Storm Eowyn, and planned rail engineering work closed the East Coast main line between Peterborough and London all weekend.
Some trains that did run from further north in England made it to Scotland – but one Lumo train from Newcastle to Edinburgh arrived in the Scottish capital five hours behind schedule.
The West Coast main line, connecting London Euston with southern Scotland, reopened earlier than expected on Sunday evening. Most trains are likely to be cancelled next Sunday when strikes by Avanti West Coast train managers resume.
Scotland was worst hit of the UK nations by extreme weather. David Ross, communications director for ScotRail, told BBC Radio Scotland more than 120 trees had fallen onto Scottish rail lines since Storm Eowyn began. In addition, debris such as trampolines had blocked tracks.
He said: “The vast majority of our routes are up and running.
“There are some parts of the country where it won’t be a quick fix and it will take a few days.”
Replacement buses will run on a number of routes west and southwest of Glasgow, but Mr Ross said it had not proved possible to procure road transport on all disrupted routes.
Source: independent.co.uk
