Avanti West Coast, LNER, ScotRail and TransPennine Express services are all affected this morning due to an amber weather warning in place for Northern England and Scotland.
Heavy rain is set to pass through, and as a result, services may be suspended and speed restrictions in place.
Avanti West Coast services will not travel north of Preston today (7th October), and passengers are advised not to travel.
LNER will not run services north of Newcastle today (7th October), and no services will run between Edinburgh and Inverness tomorrow (8th October).
TransPennine Express has placed a Do Not Travel warning on its Manchester / Liverpool / Preston / Carlisle / Glasgow Central / Edinburgh route.
For ScotRail, there is a long list of routes affected today, with a Do Not Travel warning on The West Highland Line, The Highland Mainline and lines to and from Balloch and Helensburgh Central.
To see the full list of ScotRail (and other operators) warnings, please click here.
For those wondering about Flying Scotsman’s trip to Inverness, this tour has now been revised and is set to run between Edinburgh and Aberdeen instead. Timings for this are available by clicking here.
Also, The West Highland Pullman tour, using the Midland Pullman HST, has been cancelled throughout due to the closure of the West Highland Line.
Responses
An extraordinary decision by Avanti not to run trains north of Preston today, because of a heavy rain forecast for Scotland.
Firstly, Preston is around 150 miles south of the Scottish border and it’s difficult to see why Avanti couldn’t run trains at least as far as Carlisle. Secondly, the weather was only a forecast – AFAIK there was no flooding all the way to Glasgow and Edinburgh – only north of those cities.
If the railway industry starts to cancel trains when there are merely forecasts of inclement weather, we’ll have virtually no train services at all, because these days there are ALWAYS warnings of bad weather.