Cold snap escalates travel disruptions in UK

Heavy snow has pummeled parts of the UK, hampering travel in different parts of the country.

The snow forced the Liverpool airport to shut down and caused holiday traffic mayhem with multiple road accidents.

Meanwhile, the UK’s national weather service has issued alerts for cold weather and falling snow across the country, including the east of England, northwest England, Wales, the East Midlands, Yorkshire and Humber, the West Midlands, London, and southeast England.

Earlier, British commuters found that snow and delayed engineering works on the East Coast mainline meant that many had to abandon their journeys.

A £200 million engineering project to install overhead power cables on the East Coast mainline just north of King’s Cross, scheduled for Christmas and Boxing Day, has overrun – meaning that trains are being terminated at Finsbury Park, a few miles north, or Peterborough.

The result has been chaos and overcrowding, as Finsbury Park only has four platforms – compared to a dozen at King’s Cross. Other trains have simply been cancelled, meaning the ones that are running are massively overcrowded.

In other developments, 36,000 people in the west of the country were left without power on Friday night. Many of those were still suffering disruptions to their electricity throughout Saturday. In the East Midlands, hundreds of homes are still without power.