RAIL travellers on the East Coast main line at Christmas will have to book all seats in advance - or face not being able to travel at all, it was announced yesterday.

Great North Eastern Railways, which has its route between London and Scotland, announced that all its services between December 21 and January 3 would be reserved-seats only.

GNER, which traditionally carried party-goers to Hogmany celebrations in Edinburgh, said the move was necessary to prevent overcrowding.

Nationally, the Rail Passenger Committee (RPC) branded the move as "madness" and said it violated the fundamental principle of the railway network, that passengers should be able to turn up and buy a ticket for their required train.

However, locally the RPC said it could understand why the move was felt to be necessary by GNER.

Ernie Preston, secretary of the RPC of North Eastern England, said: "This is a very special situation.

"Generally, I would stand by what the RPC is saying nationally but, when you look at it from a local perspective, we have a situation where GNER in the run-up to and during the Christmas period will still be running fewer trains than it would have done before Hatfield.

"In previous years they would have tried to keep up with demand with extra trains, but this is not possible.

"So what they have done is to think perhaps it would be better for people to find out now whether they can travel when they want to by booking a seat, rather than turning up at a station on Christmas Eve to find out they can't go where they want to. They have tried to come up with a damage limitation strategy.

"I can understand why they would want to do this because it could help to stop overcrowding on the trains."

During Christmas and New Year, GNER will run one train an hour to Edinburgh and Leeds, instead of the normal three. One extra train could be provided at peak times, a spokesman said.

"We would normally have around 60,000 passengers a day, and at the moment we are running at around 40 per cent of that, 24,000," he said.

"We would urge people to book early for the festive season, and apologise for the problems this is causing. We will be doing everything we can to provide a timetable which is reliable. We would also urge people who have already bought tickets for the festive period to contact us to check on times and bookings."

GNER has also scrapped increases in general fares, which were due on January 7, as a "goodwill gesture" to passengers.

The spokesman said: "We will be working hard to win passengers back and will not be putting the fares up as normal in January."

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