Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. I am at London Kings Cross.

It's Friday the 22nd of December and I'm here really just to see how things are running after a couple of miserable days of disruption of London terminal stations. Kings Cross was a right old

muddle yesterday because of problems with overhead wires related to Storm Pier. That led to many,

many cancellations. Today, actually, we've got the old favourites of shortage of train crew which is leading to cancellations on

Great Northern on Thameslink from across in St Pancras and also on LNER.

So that is going to always be a bit of a blight.

It's coming on a day when we've just learnt that railfares in England will go up 4.9% from March.

That's less than the kind of stipulated rise that we would normally see related to the retail price index in July.

But it's still quite a kick in the teeth for those who rely on

trains and have found that 2023 has been extraordinarily unreliable so heading across to

London Houston well that's the hub for the west coast main line going up to the west midlands

to northwest England and also to Scotland and that was awful

yesterday we saw problems with overhead wires in the Milton Keynes area and that basically blocked

the line for several hours tens of thousands of people missed their trip but actually the people

I feel most sorry for are those who were

using some pancreas international, trying to get to Paris, to Amsterdam or to Brussels,

because a sudden strike by members of a French trade union working for Euro tunnel at the

control centre for the Channel Tunnel decided to walk out in support of a French trade union working for Euro tunnel at the control centre for the Channel Tunnel,

decided to walk out in support of a demand for a pay rise, and that scuppered the plans

of about 25,000 people who were desperately hoping to get away on one of 30 Euro-star trains

from London to Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels and back, which were all cancelled.

And I think I have been speaking to Britain's unluckiest rail passenger, someone who suffered both

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