Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travel, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape, or actually away and having the time of your life, or perhaps like me, sitting in a railway station, wondering when a train might finally appear. This particular waiting

room is at Gatwick Airport. There's widespread cancellations on both southern and on Thameslink

due to high levels of Omicron among their train crew. Today I'm looking at what your options are if you want to get

around on Christmas Day and you happen to be in the UK. Well it's not looking

great but there are some alternatives. I'm not talking here about hitchhiking although

I know from plenty of experience that Christmas Day is a pretty good day for getting a lot of lifts very quickly, although I am the first to accept that it most certainly isn't a practice that everybody will want to do, and maybe i may actually even be the last hitchhiker who

knows you're not going to find any trains running at all on christmas day unless i guess there

might be some very late running trains that get in sometime after midnight it It is now absolutely customary that there is a

complete shutdown. Didn't used to be the case. There always used to be a few trains running around

the Glasgow area, but they're not happening. When things finally come back to life on Boxing Day,

it is just going to be a few relatively local services that will be

running on the trains. And there's actually, for the first time in decades, Scot Rail couldn't tell

me exactly when there are going to be trains running between the two biggest cities in Scotland,

which is Edinburgh and Glasgow. So that's something to look forward to if you're

shuttling across there. But back to Christmas Day. So what are your chances of getting

anywhere? Well, again, between those two cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scottish City Link,

are running buses. And buses are your best bet generally. If you look at what

National Express is doing, they say that they've got a good number of people travelling. They've

got routes in particular serving the airports, Stansted and Luton, very popular, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester,

many of them going to and from London, but there is some scope for getting around and of course getting to the airports.

Well, I always rely on National Express buses on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Also worth considering, would you believe, flying?

Because even though there's no services

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