Easter weekend travel: What you can expect during Britain’s second-busiest holiday, from rail to road

Analysis: Harrow & Wealdstone is spending an unusual weekend in the limelight

On a normal Friday lunchtime, the distant end of London’s Bakerloo line is sparsely populated. The pale brickwork and cream-and-plum colonnade on platform 1 greets a Tube train only every 10 minutes, depositing a handful of passengers.

But on Good Friday, every Underground train arriving from Elephant & Castle was, in the jargon, “full and standing” – packed with hundreds of travellers and their baggage.

The same will apply on Easter Monday, when Harrow & Wealdstone will again act as understudy for one of the busiest stations in Britain, London Euston. It is serving as the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line – the nation’s artery, connecting the capital with Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and beyond.

I spent an hour there, observing the weary flow of travellers dragging their bags up to the footbridge, where they were corralled until their northbound train was ready on platform 3 – and jostling with passengers who had just been turfed off their Virgin expresses 10 miles short of central London.

On the nonstop express that constitutes Twitter, meanwhile, travellers on the East Coast Main Line, which runs north from King’s Cross, reported ridiculous overcrowding; the recommended alternative route for Manchester and Scotland is on LNER’s heavily booked trains to Leeds.

The nature of travel over bank holiday weekends means that many of these perplexed passengers are only occasional travellers – who will draw the understandable conclusion that long-distance rail is some kind of obstacle course, and vow to drive next time.

Network Rail, which has closed Euston station, insists that an independent review concluded: “Christmas, Easter and bank holidays are the best times for upgrades that need major lines to be closed.”

A public vote of railway users would conclude exactly the same thing, because commuter journeys dip sharply over Easter and other annual festivals. But it is peak time for travellers trying to reach family gatherings or weekend escapes.

From the perspective of planners, Easter is second only to the long Christmas-New Year break as a favourite for blockading main lines. There are alternatives. The lines could close only for a few hours each night, which is fearfully expensive, drags out projects for years and adds the regular risk of overrunning engineering work, wrecking yet another morning rush hour. Or, as is popular on the continent, closing lines for months on end to get everything done in one burst. Britain has gone for the middle way to improve the “permanent way”, as the network is known.

The Euston work is preparing for HS2, the high-speed line connecting London with the midlands, which is due to be along in 2026. Until then, intercity travellers can expect many more bank holiday journeys to resemble endurance tests.