Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 28th of

April and I'm sorry that it is late in the day but I have been following a moving target which is basically

all the chaos that we are seeing across Spain and Portugal as a result of the shutdown of the

electricity system. It's not still clear what

might have caused it, but the effects are all too obvious. If we may start on the trains,

because I think that is where the most numbers of very, very badly affected people are going to be located. Spain has by far the

most extensive high-speed rail network in Europe, just on the line between Madrid and Barcelona.

There were dozens of trains at the time when the whole system came to a grinding halt,

about 1230 local time. Travelers to and from Alicante, Valencia, Seville and Malaga

also affected. Those trains, well, I estimate that we could see at least 50, which have been stranded

in various different places, perhaps with 800, maybe even a thousand people on board. That is

into the tens of thousands of people in those

positions. No clue yet when they might be rescued, there is some provision made, of course,

by train companies for making sure that people have, for instance, enough water in the event

of a long delay. I've covered some very long delays actually for

Eurostar. Diesel haul trains will not be so badly affected, but of course it may well be that

the signalling system is down, as many communications are currently known to be.

Let's have a look at the flights, though, because in a sense,

that's where most people are going to be affected. And around 100 cancellations so far,

mostly to and from Lisbon cancelled. The aviation analytics firm, Sirium says over 500 flights

were due to operate from UK airports to Spain and Portugal today.

That's well getting on for 100,000 seats. We haven't seen though anything like the closure of Heathrow that we

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