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

and I'm travelling today of course because that's sort of what I do but where I

explicitly am is at Luton Airport Parkway for a a couple of reasons. First of all to just consider the

fantastic new link, the dark shuttle that runs up the hill. It's a fantastic piece of engineering.

It costs, well, the wrong side of 200 million pounds. And from

where I am at the lower station by the railway, Leuton Airport Parkway itself, you can see the

control tower, you can occasionally see the tail of an aircraft manoeuvring. It's a distance

of barely a mile. and yet it's always been a bit of an

obstacle. If you wanted to walk actually, all you do is you come out with a station, turn right

onto Kempton Road and up you go and you'll probably get there in 20 minutes or so if you weren't carrying too much luggage.

But many people as you can possibly here are carrying lots of luggage and they're having a bit of a battle with that.

But they're also having a battle with the fares.

Currently £4.90 and it's been talked about being the most expensive railway in Britain. It certainly

isn't. There's many more very short distance journeys which will cost more than that per mile.

But it is fairly prohibitive. If you want to avoid it by by the way, and you don't want to walk,

then it's quite straightforward. You just come out of the station and find the bus stop

just by the Hampton by Hilton Hotel and with the fares cap in place. All there comes

and easy jeff right, no surprise there. It will cost you just two pounds.

And the other thing is that they seem to be running only one train every ten minutes.

And that rather makes a mockery of the 32 minutes from central London to the airport.

For example, my train, which I came out on East Midlands Railway, that was nine minutes

late arriving.

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