Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder, the last day of April,

yes, Tuesday the 30th, and I'm once again at Houston Station. I spend quite a lot of time here

because, well, partly it's one of the UK's most important hubs for travellers,

and partly because, well, I'm afraid there's an awful lot of trouble that stems from here.

Some of it planned, some of it not.

Today I'm going to talk about what's planned, so you can perhaps plan your own trips,

because we're coming up again to another bank holiday weekend.

That's going to be on, well, starting on the 4th of May, that's Saturday, continuing right through, of course, Sunday Monday.

And then, well, we'll have more strikes along the way.

So let me try and unpick what is happening.

And most of the problems that are going to affect people because of network rail engineering

work over the bank holiday weekend will be centred on the West Coast main line. This of course

connects London-Uston where I am now with the West Midlands, North West England,

North Wales and Southern Scotland. The big problems that as far as I can see

is that the main London to Birmingham line is going to be completely severed between rugby and Birmingham International.

Basically, that means the bit with Coventry in the middle is out of service.

That's track renewal work in the Coventry area.

That's going to hit Avanti West Coast and, of course, the other operators, West Midlands Railway,

its partner London North Western Railway it's part of the London

North Western Railway and also cross-country running from Leamington to Coffetry but that's not too

much of a problem because you can always go via Solly Hull that's my motto in life but there's lots of

other issues and if you look at the Avanti West Coast what the bank holiday weekend is

...