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

It is Thursday the 21st of December, which means it's a slightly bleak midwinter for hundreds of thousands of travellers.

Yes, I am very sorry to report that Storm Pier is causing all manner of misery, particularly in the northern half of Britain.

Let me tell you what has been happening during the day. In Scotland,

a large number of routes have been closed completely. The railway does not want to close

lines, of course, especially at a time of year when so many people want to get to their destination.

But in the case of railways, if you have high winds,

then anything from trees to trampolines can be blown onto those lines and that will cause a danger.

A lot of the most beautiful scenic journeys in Scotland, for instance the West Highland line from Glasgow Queen's

Queen's to Fort William and to Malik. That's been closed. A number of passengers this morning

heading south from Inverness to the capital Edinburgh ended up on bus replacement services

and it's been very, very tough. Trans-P trans penine express which runs to and from

Edinburgh and does a number of other Anglo-Skottish services actually said if you don't have to

travel today please do not and that's been repeated really in northern England and northern trains have been making a number of

well speed restrictions in place causing cancellations and delays it's also been pretty

tough on the West Coast main line I've been looking at some of the trains which have

been heading south from Glasgow picking up long delays due to speed restrictions.

And then we had, oh my goodness, some sort of bag being blown into the overhead lines between crew and Stoke-on-Trent,

and that brought everything to a halt on that important line so it's been very messy and a lot

of people getting very stressed I'm delighted to say that here at London Waterloo

which is by some counts the busiest main line station in the UK if you don't

count the Elizabeth line and things going pretty normally very very busy day and particularly in the UK, if you don't count the Elizabeth line, things going pretty normally.

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