Easter travel disruptions: Can Britain's creaking infrastructure cope with the holiday getaway?

Travellers can expect problems on the roads and trains

(Getty)

The biggest travel rush of the year so far is under way. But travellers by road and rail face frustrating journeys, due to engineering works on the nation’s creaking infrastructure.

What’s the busiest day at the airports?

At Britain’s largest airport, Heathrow, it’s today. Passengers are flying out at an average of two per second during operating hours. The terminals at England’s busiest holiday airport, Gatwick, will be at their busiest on Good Friday, with 65,000 passengers expected to leave. Passenger numbers are up 11 per cent over last year, making it the busiest-ever Easter for the Sussex airport. Barcelona is in the top destination, followed by Dublin and Malaga, with Geneva and Orlando edging out last year’s top-five contenders, Faro and Amsterdam.

Stansted is also expecting Good Friday to be its peak day for departures, with 40,500 passengers taking off. The following day, Ryanair dips a toe into the Atlantic by launching the first budget flights to the Azores. A weekly flight will connect Essex with the island of Sao Miguel.

More than a quarter-million passengers are expected to arrive and depart through Manchester airport over the Easter weekend, though the airport’s peak day is predicted to be the following week, on Friday 10 April.

On the rails?

Over the Easter weekend, two major rail arteries will be severed. The worst disruption will be between London Euston and Hemel Hempstead on the West Coast main line. Services between the capital and Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow are likely to involve circuitous journeys, which could double normal travel times. Depending on your journey, you may need start or end your journey at Marylebone, St Pancras or King's Cross, and expect to change once or twice along the way.

And going west?

Journeys on the Great Western line between London, Bristol and South Wales will be protracted because of engineering work between the capital and Didcot Parkway. Trains to Bristol Parkway will take twice as long as usual, with a detour via Banbury and Oxford. You don’t need an Ordnance Survey map to know that’s a long diversion. Trains from Paddington to Bristol Parkway, normally an 80-minute journey, will take exactly twice as long as usual. Services to and from Devon and Cornwall will serve London Waterloo.

Passengers on CrossCountry trains that normally pass through Reading will be carried on bus replacement services, typically adding an hour to journey times.

Will there be a repeat of the chaos at Christmas?

Unlikely. As a reminder of what went wrong last time, two sets of engineering works west and north of London overran, which meant inter-city services on the East Coast main line and the Great Western lines from Paddington were blocked, wrecking the plans of tens of thousands of travellers. The rail industry is hoping to avoid a repeat, and is also putting hundreds of buses on standby in case they are needed to replace trains in the event of overruns.

Why can’t I find the usual Advance rail fares over Easter?

Many are available, but where they are not then it is probably because of the train operators wanting to limit demand for services that they expect to be crowded. A good way to do that is to offer only the usual off-peak prices, rather than to sell Advance tickets at lower fares. “Pay more, take longer,” is the rule for many travellers this Easter.

How bad will the roads be?

The disruption on the railways is likely to increase the number of car users, with 16 million vehicles predicted to take to the roads. While Highways England lifted 550 miles of traffic restrictions this morning, the sheer volume of traffic will cause hold-ups at traffic bottlenecks.

The M25 around London is predicted to be slow in the north-west section between the M40 and Watford, and also around the Dartford Crossing. The M6 will be stressed along several stretches, with the M58-M62 and M54-M5 segments particularly bad tomorrow.

Two popular A-roads are also likely to be crowded: the A303 through Wiltshire on either side of Stonehenge, and the A64 between York and Scarborough.

In Wales, road works on the A40 at Abergavenny and the A5 at Llangollen will slow motorists heading for the hills.

And the ferries?

For drivers heading for the Continent, Good Friday will be the busiest day; P&O, the biggest ferry operator between Dover and Calais, expects to carry more than 30,000 passengers, with the highest pressure during the morning.

In Scotland, the ferry operator, Caledonian MacBrayne, has added extra sailings to and from Arran because of strong demand.