December 27th - Can the railways be rescued?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm at Paddington Station where the great reset following the Christmas break and recent industrial action was supposed to be behind us. Unfortunately for many travellers though, the railways continue to be in a right old state. When this shambles of strikes, overrunning engineering work, signal failures and general mayhem is finally over, the railway industry will have a heck of a job to do to try to entice passengers back.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and yes I'm at a railway station. |
| 0:08.4 | Sur prize, surprise, yes. So what is he going to say today that's fresh and interesting? |
| 0:15.1 | Will you be the judge of that, dear listener? But I am genuinely looking pretty concerned about what is happening to the |
| 0:24.7 | railways. It's just a terrible, terrible sadness, I feel that, well, here we are. It's the day |
| 0:33.8 | that everything is supposed to be resurrected after the Christmas break with a strike |
| 0:40.5 | just to twist the knife on the usual engineering works and I've just watched from here at |
| 0:47.8 | Pannington Station as everything has unraveled let me just look So, yeah, 402 to Bristol Temple Meads delayed. |
| 1:00.0 | 328 to Swansea delayed. Everything delayed. But that's better, I guess, than the cancellations, which is what we were seeing earlier, when the were blocked in ironically after the Christmas break at North Pole Depot. |
| 1:18.6 | This is just west of the station in the sort of Hillsden, in the Halston-Wilston area and it's the place where the Great Western Express trains are |
| 1:32.3 | stabled but anyway there was engineering works they were all trapped inside and so well there we are |
| 1:39.6 | never mind we can't start the service at nine o'clock so let's try and start it by 11 o'clock and hope for the |
| 1:47.3 | best and that's really what happened and I'm despondent from many points of view first of all |
| 1:54.3 | at this time of year people I think expect a bit of disruption what with the rail engineering works but we have |
| 2:03.2 | disruption on top of disruption on top of disruption here there is no certainty |
| 2:09.0 | anywhere I'm talking to people getting reports on via social media of people who |
| 2:16.0 | were trying to get from Norwich to Scotland. |
| 2:19.3 | Perfectly straightforward. You catch a train from Norwich to the East Coast, mainline, then you go on from there. |
| 2:24.3 | But if the first train is cancelled, well, you're going to have to wait hours. |
| 2:27.3 | It's going to be very, very crowded and what is going to happen then? |
| 2:31.3 | So you just get into the car and drive. And that is money lost to the |
| 2:36.8 | railway. That is somebody who possibly isn't going to come back to the train because they just |
| 2:43.6 | think it cannot be relied upon. And goodness me, when finally this chambles of strikes, of overrunning engineering works, |
... |
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