December 20th disaster

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This article is written in the 'future' (2022) and thus does not reflect the state of affairs in the present day, 1954. It does however represent a premonition of what is to come.

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The **December 20th disaster**, often referred to as **20/12** and the **Great Gridlock**, was a chain of escalating engineering and infrastructural disasters across the Union of Britain that took place on Friday, 20 December, 2013, as a result of decades of neglect of the country's transport system under syndicalist and democratic governments. Sparked by a national railway strike, throughout the day congestion and traffic grew increasingly more severe in response to multiple accidents on major motorways, eventually leading to what was described as a nationwide traffic jam. This in turn led to millions being unable to get to necessary shifts at vital services, including at Heathrow Airport. Here, resultant human error caused by traffic controllers working overtime led to the worst aviation disaster in British history, when a passenger jet collided with a freight plane killing 348 people.

## Background

By the end of 2013, Britain's transport networks were running at many times the capacity for which they were designed: her roads were the most congested in Europe, her skies the busiest in the world. This was largely the result of a period of unprecedented economic prosperity under the New Union-United Democrat coalition that had governed the country since 2009. Under the austere command of Finance Secretary George Osborne, Britain's economy had been dragged from the brink of the 2008 Financial Crash, and subsequently experienced a boom under the new business-friendly administration. After decades of a syndicalist state-controlled economy, and stagnant performance under the 2000-2009 United Democrat government, the country's full potential was finally being reached and exploited by the global market, who seized on the island as a jumping-off point for enterprises in Western Europe and the only recently liberalised American nations. It was, to put it bluntly, nothing short of an economic miracle, and one that was doing wonders for the popularity of the New Unionists and their otherwise-disliked leader Iain Duncan Smith.

There was however one field in which the NUP had faired no better than their UDP predecessors, and that was in the British railway network, which since its privatisation in 2001 had consistently lurched from one disaster to the next for over a decade now. The most recent until December 2013 had been an accident at Stewartby, Bedfordshire, when a train derailed at a level crossing, killing 10 passengers and 2 people on the platform. Only eighteen months later, a new tragedy struck on 2 December when a passenger train collided at speed into a derailed freight train just outside Waverley Station, Edinburgh. 6 people were killed and dozens were injured, and this proved the final straw for the railway unions. Encouraged by the incendiary rhetoric of the Phoenix Front, of which many union workers were members, the two largest rail workers' unions, ASLEF and RMT, called for a series of 24-hour strikes across the country. Railtrack, which owned most railway infrastructure in Britain, attempted to stop this with a court injunction, but the attempt failed and the rail unions pressed ahead. The first of their planned strikes was thus scheduled to take place on Friday, 20 December, from 8am.

## Day of the disaster

### The strike begins

The day dawned with record traffic being recorded both on motorways across the country and in the air as airlines running extra services found themselves stretched to capacity regardless. As the last Friday before Christmas there was consequently the expected congestion issues from holiday traffic, but the lack of rail and tube services meant a vastly higher number of commuting vehicles on the roads too. There was on top of this a much higher flow of freighters and lorries attempting to compensate for the loss of rail freight transport. The result was near-total gridlock; the M25 had ground to a total standstill by 9:00am, and was in the words of Insp. Oswald Turner, the director of Surrey Traffic Control, "the worst I'd ever seen".

Far north in Edinburgh, the Minister of Transport Grant Shapps spent the morning with inspectors from the Railway Safety Authority at Waverley, the sight of the fatal collision three weeks earlier where the wreckage was now being examined. Shapps had been dispatched to the scene of the accident by his superior, Transport Secretary David Cameron, to show that on the day of the strike the government was doing everything it could to ensure a comprehensive investigation of the causes of the crash. Cameron himself was occupied back in Westminster attempting to manage the disarray that the railway strike had left Britain's transport networks in. By all accounts he, or at least his civil service subordinates were doing a surprisingly good job, because by midday none of the traffic chaos that had been predicted by motoring organisations had taken place.

### Initial accidents

This couldn't last however, nor had anyone at Surrey Traffic Control expected it to. Sure enough at 12:31pm calls came in of a collision at Junction 10 of the M25. A lorry had crashed through the central reservation of the motorway, and ploughed into the path of a van and several vehicles. Dozens had been injured, but thankfully no one killed. One young woman was however trapped in the wreckage, and the Traffic Authority was left with no choice but to close that stretch of motorway. Being a vital intersection of the busiest road artery in the country, this would have massive consequences, and the decision was not taken lightly, but policy had to be followed.