Avanti West Coast has been accused of ‘risking chaos’ this Christmas by Labour as rail tickets are currently not available to book for the festive period.

Passengers are unable to book tickets throughout weekends in November and no trains are available from Saturday, December 10.

Avanti West Coast, who have services through Cumbria and run Carlisle train station, recently had its contract for the West Coast Mainline extended for six months but was ordered to 'drastically improve services'.

The new deal means Avanti West Coast, which is jointly owned by FirstGroup and Italian state-owned company Trenitalia, will continue to operate its services until April, but further deals depend on its performance over the winter and spring.

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The shadow transport secretary, Labour’s Louise Haigh, has written to the transport secretary saying that the current situation is ‘staggering’.

She wrote: ““It is frankly staggering that at this critical time of year for businesses, passengers are unable to book weekend travel across the length of the UK. This will be deeply damaging for regional growth.

“That’s why you must urgently address the gaping holes in your botched improvement plan. So, will you demand that these critical weekend services for the period up to Christmas are urgently made available to book?

“Can you explain why you seemingly handed over millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money without securing this most basic commitment in the first place? And can you outline how many total weekend services Avanti are planning to run throughout this contract extension?”

A spokesperson for Avanti said: “Our weekday tickets are available into December, but weekends are made more difficult by engineering work, which is taking place almost every weekend until Christmas.

“We are making progress though, and by early November we’ll be selling weekend tickets four weeks in advance. We’ll continue to push this booking window further out as quickly as we can.”

 

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