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Britain's rail network shuts down every year on Christmas Day, with a limited service on Boxing Day.

Many routes will be closed for longer during the festive period because of Network Rail carrying out engineering work.

Christmas is a good time to do major engineering work, because the demand is lower over several days.

The lessons of that were very severe, and the rail industry and Network Rail, in particular, has worked extraordinarily hard not to replicate that again, because it was disastrous, and disastrous for passengers.

That we are concerned about with several train operators, exacerbated by the fact that inevitably the closures close parts of the railway and put more pressure on others."

I've been through this a lot with Alex [Alex Hynes, director general for the DfT's rail services group] recently and will continue to be into, right up to and over Christmas.

Generally as a system, we're over-reliant on overtime working for train crew.
That's a risk, which may be worse at Christmas time than other times.