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Biggest Repair Project Paralyzes UK’s Railway

A Southern train and Gatwick Express train (l-r) pull into Victoria Station. The company says it will challenge the strike action in the high court (file photo) PA
A Southern train and Gatwick Express train (l-r) pull into Victoria Station. The company says it will challenge the strike action in the high court (file photo) PA
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Biggest Repair Project Paralyzes UK’s Railway

A Southern train and Gatwick Express train (l-r) pull into Victoria Station. The company says it will challenge the strike action in the high court (file photo) PA
A Southern train and Gatwick Express train (l-r) pull into Victoria Station. The company says it will challenge the strike action in the high court (file photo) PA

Britain's railway networks will witness the biggest repair project in their history, which will suspend the activity in most of the country’s train stations; only three of the 29 rail network in Britain will be functioning.

The repair workshop, which will run until January 2 in some areas, includes 260 projects in 3400 sites, according to the National Rail, reported AFP.

The repairs are expected to cost 160.4 million pounds (214 million dollars), said the association, which is responsible for overseeing passenger train operating companies.

The Guardian newspaper said that only Chiltern Railways, Merseyrail and ScotRail would be operating only on Tuesday, at a limited capacity.

A Department of Transport spokeswoman told the Guardian that train services generally do not operate on Boxing Day in England and Wales due to lack of demand, but a survey cited by the Express newspaper found that three out of 10 Britons would take to the roads on Tuesday to visit loved ones.

Speaking Monday to the Express, British Transport Secretary Chris Grayling urged the public to be forgiving about the rail closures because the maintenance work was vital to expand and improve services.

"There are a lot of people who waived their Christmas to improve the railways," he told the paper. "I just ask people not to forget them."

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China Says its Astronauts Complete Record-breaking Spacewalk

File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
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China Says its Astronauts Complete Record-breaking Spacewalk

File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS

Two Chinese astronauts this week completed a world-record spacewalk of more than nine hours, according to a statement from China's Manned Space Agency, marking another milestone for Beijing's rapidly expanding space program.

The spacewalk, carried out by Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong outside the Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit on Tuesday, was at least four minutes longer than the last record set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms in 2001, according to Reuters.

The two astronauts of China's Shenzhou-19 mission donned their Feitian spacesuits to carry out an array of tasks on the station's exterior, including the installation of space-debris protection devices, China's space agency said.

"They successfully completed all the planned tasks and felt very excited about it," Wu Hao, a staffer from the China Astronaut Research and Training Center, told China Central Television, a state broadcaster.

The former Soviet Union in 1965 became the first nation to carry out a spacewalk. Since then, Russia and the United States have conducted hundreds of such missions, primarily outside the International Space Station for tasks ranging from solar panel installations to materials research.

The first spacewalk by a Chinese astronaut occurred in 2008.

China's spacewalking milestone this week comes amid a flurry of other recent cosmic achievements that have boosted Beijing's competitive footing with the United States.

China landed its first rover on Mars in 2021 and earlier this year became the first country to retrieve rock samples from the moon's treacherous far side in its Chang'e-6 mission.

Beijing is targeting 2030 to land its first astronauts on the moon to become the second country after the US to put humans there. Beijing has courted roughly a dozen countries for its International Lunar Research Station program, an effort to build a moon base on the moon's south pole.

That program rivals NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission of 1972.