Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Thursday the 10th of April,

and in a week which hasn't been entirely filled with good news, I'm hoping that I can bring you some.

The first piece of good news for me is that I am at the most beautiful railway station in Europe,

probably the world, London, St. Pancras International.

The next piece of good news is that a survey says that there is scope for this place

to treble in the amount of passengers it has going through the channel tunnel to France and beyond.

And the person who knows everything about this, I'm glad to say, is with me here at St. Pancras.

Robert Sinclair, he's the

chief executive of London-Sompacris High Speed. Robert, what is London-Sampacris High Speed?

Well, London-Sapacris High Speed is our new brand. It's our new name, it's our trading name,

which we've just recently changed. We were HS1. But for us, we really want to be a lot more

proactive in the role that we take

and also using our voice to actually get behind the growth of high-speed rail and to support

our operators. And we just couldn't do that with HS1. It wasn't known, didn't I sort of have any

consumer recognition, and it also got confused with HS2 as2. Which nobody wants to do. Indeed.

So it's a new name and it's a new dawn for us in terms of using that to support modal shift,

support our operators. On which subject you've got this remarkable new survey? What's it?

What are the main headlines? The main headlines are that over the next 15 years, there is the potential for

the market in terms of passenger numbers to triple, from 11 million passengers now to 35 million

passengers in 2014. Now that's driven by a number of factors, Simon, so that includes a background

demand, economic growth, population growth and so forth.

But the key thing is that the forecasts demonstrate that there's a real prospect of modal shift.

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