This Christmas we’ll prepare the railway for west London’s newest station – Old Oak Common. The station will help give you quick and reliable journeys to London, the Midlands, north England and Scotland.
Essential preparations
Over 350 colleagues will work hard this Christmas and New Year carrying out essential prep work for Old Oak Common.
This will include drainage, track and signalling work around the station. Plus, we’ll install overhead line equipment to power electric trains.
We’ll also improve the track, signals and overhead lines on the Great Western Main Line between Reading and London Paddington.
Better journeys and more connections
The new station – west of Paddington – will serve an estimated 250,000 passengers a day. It will have 14 platforms with connections to the Great Western Main Line, Heathrow Express, the Elizabeth line and the new high-speed line between London and Birmingham – HS2.
Catching the Elizabeth line here will get you to Farringdon in 10 minutes and London Liverpool Street station in 20 minutes.
You’ll also be able to get to London Heathrow Airport in 10 minutes using Heathrow Express. And you’ll be able to travel to major cities across Britain, including Oxford, Swansea, Manchester and Glasgow from here.
Old Oak Common is one of four new stations that will sit on the new HS2 line. Trains on HS2 will travel up to 225 miles an hour – getting you to destinations from London to the West Midlands in record times.
Peter Gow, project client for Old Oak Common Station at HS2, said: “Old Oak Common will be a super-hub of connectivity, bringing together HS2, Great Western Main Line, and Heathrow Express services, as well as becoming the forty-second stop on the Elizabeth line.”
Check before you travel
We’ll need to close parts of our railway near the station site so our engineers can carry out the work safely and efficiently.
No trains will call at London Paddington between Friday 27 and Sunday 29 December. Some trains will instead be diverted to and from London Euston, with most trains starting and stopping at Reading and Ealing Broadway.
For journeys into central London, you can change at Ealing Broadway and take the underground, using either the District or Central lines.
Please check before you travel this Christmas: nationalrail.co.uk/Christmas.
Thank you for bearing with us while we carry out this essential work.
