Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder at a rather noisy and fairly chaotic Waterloo Station in central London.

Yes, we've got large scale cancellations and delays today.

Major disruption caused by signalling problems between here and Clapham Junction and also

broken rail on the way to Portsmouth. Large the Exeter train and the Portsmouth Harbour train

have just been cancelled. But just looking down from my perch here on the mezzanine,

it's not actually going to affect too many

travellers because there aren't that many people travelling today we're in this curious time

between christmas and new year when certainly commuting was always rather less than normal

and in these days of working from home I think that's certainly the case.

But I want to talk to you about an issue which I was looking at yesterday which is all about Christmas Day and Boxing Day working on the railways.

You might remember I was at London St. Pancras yesterday I liked to get around and working on the railways. You might remember I was at London some pancreas yesterday.

I like to get around and reporting on the fact that the only intercity long distance train services

would take you from London to Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam. And I put out a poll on X formerly Twitter,

which I thought turned out to have some quite interesting results.

It had over 13,000 results now. I absolutely must stress that polls on social media are unscientific.

And so therefore, you must take that into account. It's a self-selecting

bunch of people who are voting, some of whom will have quite strong thoughts, as I saw from some

of the quite fruity language directed at me for even suggesting that this might be a thing.

I hope I was fair. I said, basically, should we give

the couple of days off to rail staff? I know that many of them, of course, are working

behind the scenes on network rail projects, or would you like to see trains running on Christmas

Day, on Boxing Day, or just on Boxing Day?

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