Two-hour queues and ‘do not travel’ warning as strikes hit bank holiday travel

Millions of people will find themselves waiting in long queues on the roads or having trains cancelled by engineering works and strikes as England, Wales and Northern Ireland observe a bank holiday this weekend.

The Met Office said temperatures will rise across the weekend, peaking at 28°C in some parts of southern and central England on Monday. But anyone hoping to make the most of it with a weekend getaway or trips to see family and friends faces travel misery.

Not a single CrossCountry train – which operate on routes from Penzance to Aberdeen – is running on Saturday as workers strike over staffing, safety and pay.

This will cause major knock-on disruption on Sunday before Monday trains are cancelled again between the South Coast of England and the Midlands.

Major routes on Avanti West Coast and London Northwestern Railway will also be shut over the weekend because of engineering works. Services have either been cancelled or diverted – meaning journeys will take longer – as Network Rail carries out 261 projects across the UK.

Drivers also face getaway chaos as more than 17 million hit the roads for the bank holiday. Major roads in southern England will be among the most congested, with the RAC urging travellers to set off as early as possible or “be prepared to spend longer in traffic”.

Rail strike nightmare

• CrossCountry said it will run a reduced timetable over the weekend and has advised passengers against attempting travel on its services on Saturday when no services will run.

• It added that services on Sunday are also likely to be subject to cancellations across all CrossCountry routes.

• A very limited CrossCountry service will operate on Monday between 8am and 6pm, but there will be no trains running between Birmingham, Reading and the South Coast, and no service between Leicester, Cambridge and Stansted airport.

Some drivers spent two hours in queues for the ferry at the Port of Dover on Friday.

Danish ferry operator DFDS said queues for border control had stretched to over an hour while it was taking an average 40 minutes for cars to check-in.

On the M20 in Kent – the route taken by a large proportion of vehicles making Channel crossings via Dover or Folkestone – drivers were stuck in bottleneck queues.

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Nick Mullender, from the RAC, said major roads to airports and coastal destinations will be “extremely busy”, with the South East and South West “bearing the brunt of most holiday hold-ups”.

People travelling to the airport will also want to set off in good time to ensure they make their flights.

During the bank holiday weekend, 12,474 flights are scheduled to depart from UK airports, the equivalent of over two million seats, up from 11,747 flights that departed over the early May bank holiday, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Friday was projected to be the busiest day for UK airport departures across the weekend, with 3,256 flights set to take off.

Heathrow, the UK’s biggest airport, will see the highest number of departures – 2,679, followed by Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.