Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Tuesday, 11th of April. Yes, it's not Monday at all, however you may be feeling about that.

And today, I'm afraid I'm returning to the slightly rocky state of the railways.

You'll recall, of course, we had strikes, the last one of which actually took place

almost a month ago. Since then, no further strikes, which is great news.

The RMT union has said that progress in talks isn't going as well as they would like,

and they're just reminding everyone that they've got a current mandate to strike, and they will be

putting that out to a vote to renew, unless there is significant progress. Nothing. Haven't heard a word

out of the Azlef train drivers union, so I'm assuming that they are

crossing the T's and dotting the eyes on an agreement. So I'm not worried about strikes at the

moment, and wouldn't it be great to put that whole horrible, horrible, um, well, 10 months, um, behind us.

But what I am worried about is the state of the railways. Yes, um, they're, they're in pretty

dismal repair. And that was, that became horribly clear over Easter when suddenly

newnum viaduct was declared too dangerous.

They said there was an awful lot of movement going on on a railway bridge

and I can assure you, as you will imagine,

that a lot of movement and safe railways are not compatible.

Yeah, there's a little bit of movement,

of course, whenever a train weighing hundreds of tons goes over a bridge, but not significant

amounts. Anyway, that has closed the main line connecting Oxford with Reading. It's actually

the stretch. If you can imagine the Great Western line,

the main one, London, Bristol, going effectively a pretty straight line, east-west. Well,

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