Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It is Friday the 29th of

December which means that it's getting very close to New Year's Eve, a time of year that I kind of

think for a lot of people that they are equally emotionally invested, maybe even more emotionally

invested in than Christmas Day not least

because they might well wish to be with their friends as opposed to their family I couldn't possibly

comment anyway whatever your reason for traveling if like me you are one of 20 million British

people without access to a car,

you may well be interested in what is happening on the railways.

It's been a grim old time.

And I'm getting to say for the last eight, nine days,

ever since we had the sudden strike by the Channel tunnel people in France which led to the cancellation

30 euro star trains we're now in the season of festive engineering work so there's a lot of that

about but there's also other problems now most lines in Scotland are now open however there are

cancellations due to staff shortage.

And if you look at, for example, northern trains in northwest England, then you will see that,

well, there's actually problems with getting trains at all on Sunday.

This train operator has an interesting set of industrial agreements

with the very good men and women who work for northern trains.

West of the Pennines, so the Lancashire side,

Sunday is not part of the working week.

And so if New Year's Eve falls on a Sunday and everyone thinks, frankly, I don't really want to work on New Year's Eve, I'd rather spend time with the family or my pals.

And so I'm not going to work. Don't need to. And that is entirely up to you if that's what you want to do.

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