Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 26th of August

rank holiday here in England and also in Wales. I'm at London Paddington Station, the gateway to

not just Heathrow Airport but also the west of England and South Wales and it's seen really quite a lot

of disruption there's been problems also on planes and if you are driving well a couple of things

you need to be aware of as well so let me run through where we are how it's been this weekend

and how it could have been much, much worse.

Let's start on the railways.

Absolutely miserable day yesterday on Sunday.

We knew that there was going to be engineering work on the East Coast mainline from London, Kings Cross to Yorkshire, North East England and Scotland.

We knew there'd be problems on the West Coast mainline from London, Houston to the West Midlands, North West England and Scotland.

And we knew that from here at London Paddington, the line to Swansea via Cardiff would involve going via Gloucester rather than through the 7th Tunnel Junction and that would add an hour to journeys.

So all of that was known but then things started going very badly wrong.

We saw one in 10 GWR Great Western Railway services that were supposed to be running cancelled

due to staff shortage and staff shortage also caused a large number of cancellations in North West England on northern trains.

They put out a do not travel alert for seven of their routes.

Today, things are getting back to normal.

We had streamers, would you believe, last night in the overhead wires from the Notting Hill Carnival, closing all the lines to and from London Paddington, which is working today. We've got some cancellations, the early trains from Oxford and Great Maloulven and I think Hereford didn't run,

haven't been able to establish why that was. And in West Midlands trains, they've got a large

number of cancellations with some rail replacement buses. That's again due to staff shortage.

So the railways are looking a little bit shaky but better than yesterday.

On the plane front, well, there will be, I fear, people listening to this who aren't where they

needed to be for a couple of reasons. The first one could well be that they couldn't get there

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