One of London's busiest stations is being shut down for 10 days over the Christmas period.
The closure of Liverpool Street is is a one-off event to allow a bridge to be demolished to clear the way for the extended East London line.
Network Rail will be using the opportunity to carry out other work on the track and the overhead power lines.
This is all very necessary but it is an extreme example of the railways' failure to understand that people rely on and want to use the railway over the Christmas period.
Boxing Day is traditionally a big day for sport and travelling to visit family and friends but the railway has failed to respond to the demand for years. Privatisation gave lazy managers leave to trot out lazy excuses.
Now, in an era when climate change is so obvious this lackadaisical attitude is not good enough. Public money is being poured into the railway and more passengers need to protest about the lack of rail services over Christmas and New Year.
The mainstream media have also failed to highlight the problem.
But today (20 December), Leslie Plommer in The Guardian warns passengers that many people wanting to go by train will find only a “replacement bus service”.
She points out that the service on Christmas Day is zero. And Boxing Day, next-to-zero.
The article adds: "Indeed, so eroded has the timetable become across the whole festive season that Britons now accept this as normal. But why? Can we not have proper railways that carry us around the country seeing (and crucially, fleeing) our loved ones at Christmas?
"Lack of public demand is the key reason cited by the Association of Train Operating Companies.
“After 1948, Christmas Day train services went into in decline,” it says, with passenger numbers falling throughout the 1950s — “one reason being that cars were more accessible”.
"The last passenger train at Christmas ran in 1964. Following that lead, London Underground’s last Christmas Day tube service was in 1979.
"Rail privatisation — put in place between 1993-97 by John Major’s Conservative government — has reinforced the closure trend, as commercial operators jettison unprofitable services.
"Often they attribute their patchy festive timetables to engineering work. Yet across the Channel, trains whiz all over the European Union throughout Christmas: Genoa to Naples, Gdansk to Przemysl, Lisbon to Braga. Spain, France, Hungary, and many more — all miraculously still getting their engineering done.
"In Germany, cancellation of a single train on the Yuletide schedule produces national apoplexy. And that may be the main reason Britain has no Christmas trains:
the public accepts their absence, our EU neighbours do not."