Christmas rush hits coaches

Safe option: Some travellers are avoiding the trains

Coach companies appear to be bearing the brunt of the Christmas rush as thousands of travellers choose to avoid the railways.

As people head home for the holiday, most major roads have been coping well but many train passengers have been suffering more delays and cancellations.

The Managing Director of Victoria coach station in London, Warwick Hillman, said staff were preparing themselves for another busy day on Sunday - the last shopping day before Christmas.

Speed restrictions from the Hatfield crash are still causing difficulies

The National Express coach network said it was carrying between 15% and 20% more passengers throughout the UK than at this time last year.

Mr Hillman said staff had been overwhelmed by the "busiest day in 10 years".

Virgin Trains added to the problems by cancelling 19 services between London, Birmingham and Wolverhampton.

On the roads, most reports on Saturday said traffic was no busier than normal, except around shopping centres or where there was thick fog.

All non-essential roadworks were suspended for Christmas to allow traffic to flow more freely.

A spokesman for the AA said: "It is good that Christmas Day is on a Monday because people have got a couple of days to spread things out."

Many rail passengers prepared for trouble by booking their journey in advance, and rail company GNER took tens of thousands of bookings.

But the company was only running a 40% service on the East Coast main line.

South West Trains also reported that nearly all trains between London Waterloo and the west of England were fully booked.

Virgin Trains spokeswoman Julie Beck-Richards said the company was forced to cancel some services because of demand.

She told the BBC that the company had responded by transferring rolling stock to busier routes and putting on extra services between London and Scotland.

Extra flights booked up

Some rail companies brought in crowd restriction measures to deal with the number of passengers.

Many travellers gave up on the roads and railways to travel by plane instead.

Last-minute shoppers could add to congestion

British Airways filled most of the 12,000 extra seats it had made available on domestic flights.

Other domestic airlines were expecting their busiest Christmas ever, while a million passengers fly off to the sun following the wettest autumn in 250 years.

The British Airports Authority reported a busy Saturday, with New York, Paris, Amsterdam and Ireland among the most popular destinations.

A Heathrow Airport spokeswoman said: "It has been busy.

"We are asking people not to wrap presents in case a security check needs them to be searched.

"We are expecting our busiest day to be January 2 when about 187,000 people are expected to use the airport."

Many ferry companies still had spaces on Christmas services.

Speed restrictions

Railtrack is mounting its biggest Christmas engineering programme with 8,000 people working around the clock.

Work will start as soon as trains finish running on Christmas Eve and will carry on over the following few days, at more than 60 locations.

It will result in the removal or easing of a further 100 speed restrictions to add to the 500 already in place since the beginning of the month.

A further 25 miles of track and more than 50 sets of points will be replaced and there will be other track and signalling work at major locations.