RAIL bosses watching Saturday night TV must have had their head in their hands when one particular Channel 4 advert came on.

It showed a woman comfy on her living room sofa with the world passing by out of her window.

It turned out the advert was for East Coast trains and was trying to suggest travelling from London to Newcastle on the rail network is as comfortable as watching TV at home.

At that exact moment, hundreds of train passengers were queuing in the cold outside Finsbury Park Station in London and had been doing so for at least five hours.

The prospects of getting from the capital to the North East by the end of the night were slim to none and the 24-hour news channels showed that it was a right mess.

The worst part of this sorry affair was that the problems were entirely predictable.

It happened because engineering works that began at Kings Cross Station on Christmas Day overran into Saturday.

Those in charge had enough notice of this to anticipate the fall out and to put in place some kind of crowd management procedure.

The thousands of passengers arriving at Kings Cross on Saturday were greeted by 'sorry' signs and redirected to Finsbury Park, which is tiny in comparison.

Pretty soon, staff had to close Finsbury Park and it was several hours before an organised response could be soon.

Eventually, a queuing system was put in place, rail staff organised taxis for elderly and vulnerable passengers and Network Rail said it would investigate what went wrong.

Many of the northbound trains that left Finsbury Park were delayed by around two hours or, worse, cancelled.

Those problems continued into yesterday, with too many trains in the wrong place and so more services could not run.

So, not a great way to end the year for Network Rail.

I only hope those at the top can learn from their errors and put a system in place for next time things go wrong.