Liverpool Street and Waterloo close over Christmas

Two of London’s busiest stations, Waterloo and Liverpool Street, will be shut over the Christmas period while engineering work is carried out.

Network Rail has said Liverpool Street will close so new glass panels can be installed above the station concourse and the drainage system can be replaced, while Waterloo station will need to close in order to get new points at nearby Queenstown Road installed.

There will be no trains between Stratford and Liverpool St from Christmas Day to New Year’s Day.

And there will be no trains to or from Waterloo from Christmas Day until 28 December and a very limited service to Waterloo until 4 January.

At Liverpool Street, a two-year project has seen engineers replace panels over the platforms. The panels were installed in the 1990s and had become cracked and covered in lichen.

At Christmas, the teams will move on to replacing Georgian window panes over the concourse where passengers wait for trains. The station will have to be shut for safety reasons.

The drainage system from the 1890s, which cannot cope with intense storms, will also be replaced.

The scheme has cost Network Rail £23m.

Jonathan Fernandez is overseeing the project at Liverpool Street.

“The panels here with lichen on them, it makes the station very, very dark indeed,” he said.

He added that the panels had become very brittle, were past their useful life and had “become a fragility risk especially with all the storms that we now have”.

“With the concourse roof they are actually glass panels, so where we have got fractures in the glass we are getting leaks which is causing water to get in on the concourse and causing slip hazards. And we can’t afford those cracks to get worse and pose a risk to the public,” he added.

Huge cherry pickers will be brought on to the concourse to enable removal of the glass panels. That means the concourse has to be shut.
At Waterloo, points are being replaced at Queenstown Road which will mean the line has to be shut.

On the West Coast mainline out of Euston, there will only be trains as far as Milton Keynes between Christmas Day and 5 January.

And Victoria and Vauxhall stations are also closed for a number of days as well as the Mildmay Overground line.

Passengers are advised to check before travelling with their rail operator, Network Rail or Transport for London (TfL).

Network much quieter

Chris Denham from Network Rail says most of the railway will operate as normal but it carries out engineering work at Christmas as the network is much quieter.

“It’s the quietest period on the railway.

“In some areas, you are talking 50% of normal passenger numbers. So for the massive work we need to do this Christmas for instance, it is the most logical time of year to do it.

“Particularly this year, as many people won’t have to go back to work until January 5th and that gives us a good chunk of time to do really difficult engineering.”