The lack of Christmas trains

I first brought this matter up in an internet forum around these time of year three years ago. My question to the group: why, when seemingly every other country in Europe runs rail services at Christmas do we not here in the UK? We must be one of the more secular countries of the EU and there are surely plenty of people who would travel if they could, but no services are provided. At that time I was living in Germany where as far as I remember a normal service would be running on Christmas, just like any other day. That Germany and so many other countries continued business as usual while we are forced to endure a total shut down of the network seemed illogical but perhaps symptomatic of the British work ethic.

Now it seems others have noticed this ridiculous hole in services. LibDem Transport Secretary, Alistair Carmichael MP, notes that until the Beeching era cuts the railways ran on Christmas Day. Surely running train lines in the 1950s would have required a good many more people to turn into work over Christmas given that every signal box would have had to be manned. Automation means that signalling is centralised and most trains themselves don't utilise the numbers of staff that would have been typical in the age of steam.

We've a sadly skewed sense of priorities when the importance of having a couple of fixed days off for a holiday that a great many of us don't really hold much significance in should outweigh running a national transportation network and thus cause a great deal of inconvenience for those wishing to travel during this time. As train usage rises and fondness for the CO2 emitting automobile declines, it seems like an extraordinary oversight that only ourselves and Ireland run no Christmas train services. There's no religious ground to support this transport blackout either since far more devout countries than ours run their services as normal without seemingly encountering any conflicts.

Of course raising this issue on the 21st of December isn't about to get this matter changed but at least through bringing awareness to this issue now when we can reflect on what more we might accomplish if rail services were operating over Christmas, perhaps the issue will reach the political agenda for change in the future.