Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 29th of April, back with Travel Desk Tuesday with my excellent colleague, Matali Wilson. And Natalie, what I'm particularly interested in talking about today is some transport stories in the UK that you've been writing about this month, starting with

the UK's longest direct train route cancelled by cross-country. What's happening? It has been,

so anyone that does commute from Aberdeen to Penzance no longer can on the direct route from

the 16th of May, the journey from Scotland

to Cornwall has been cancelled by cross-country. Have they told you why? So I think, and it is

fair enough, the service didn't get used by that many people. And as part of timetable roll-ups

for May 2025, they just felt it was more convenient to change the service.

And I understand they're simply stopping the train at Plymouth, so it's not going to be going

all the way into Cornwall. I'm not sure that anybody other than perhaps extreme train enthusiasts

would ever catch this from Aberdeen to Penzance, because apart from anything else,

there's more sensible ways of doing it. I think I was looking at the timetable, and it appears that if

you change trains twice, you start off on the same train, going south from Aberdeen, but you hop off

at Haymarket, which is in the western part of Edinburgh, and then you catch another train

of Ante West Coast and you go to Wolverhampton, and then you catch another train, a different

one, that will take you through to Penzance and you'll get there actually earlier than you

would do if you caught the direct train. So it all sounds a bit of a fath, doesn't it? I think

the journey was around 13 hours and 20 minutes to begin with.

It departed from Aberdeen at 8.20 a.m.

Arrived in Cornwall around 9.31 from the time tambling.

I do think you're right. Rail fans seem to be the target audience for this route.

Obviously, it first launched more than 100

years ago. I think it was 1921. So, yeah, I think maybe it ran its course. Travel patterns have

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