As the UK faces its hottest ever recorded day, and people are being advised not to travel, the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has conceded the UK’s transport network cannot cope with the extreme heat.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast he told people to “apply common sense” and “depending on the nature of your journey and reason for it you might want to consider rearranging your day around it”. He added: “We’ve seen a considerable amount of travel disruption, we’re probably going to see the hottest day ever in the UK recorded today and infrastructure, much of it built in Victorian times, just wasn’t built to withstand this type of temperature.
"It will be many years before we can replace infrastructure with the kind of infrastructure that could, because the temperatures are so extreme. Asked if the transport system can cope with the weather, he said: “The simple answer at the moment is no."
Temperatures are expected to reach as high as 40C today in some parts of the country and Shapps told the BBC: “Where those tracks are 40 degrees in the air, on the ground that could be 50, 60, 70 and more. So you get a severe danger of tracks buckling, what we can’t have is trains running over those and a terrible derailing. We’ve got to be very cautious and conscious of that, which is why there’s reduced speeds on large parts of the network."
Further adding to the transport system's woes he said, issues on the rails and roads will continue for decades during extreme heatwaves and when asked how long it will take to upgrade existing rail infrastructure to be more resilient, Shapps told Sky News: “Decades, actually, to replace it all. Ditto with Tarmac on the roads.
“There’s a long process of replacing it and upgrading it to withstand temperatures, either very hot or sometimes much colder than we’ve been used to, and these are the impacts of global warming.” He said there was no Cobra meeting planned for Tuesday, with the Prime Minister instead chairing Cabinet.
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