Hello and welcome to the final independent travel podcast of the week with me Simon Calder.

And once again, I'm at a railway station. Yes, this one is London Paddington.

But I'm not going to be talking about strikes. Oh no. I'm going to be talking about some good news

that will be coming down the tracks, although maybe not for a couple of years.

Here's the score.

This is the Eastern Hub, the London Terminal for the Great Western Railway,

which extends through Exeter and Plymouth to Penzance.

It goes across the Cotswolds to Worcester and Hereford, to Cheltenham, to Bristol, to Bath, but crucially also to South Wales.

And the good news is for people who want to travel between South Wales and London from 2024, December, it's going to get an awful lot more competitive.

This is all about open access operators and I'd love to tell you what they are. Basically,

all the main intercity lines in the UK have a prescribed operator.

It used to be they compete for the franchise,

but now effectively the Department for Transport

just outsources the trains to a lot of different providers.

Here it is GWR Great Western Railway.

You've also got the Heathrow Express and the Elizabeth line running through here, but effectively they're all very much on the same side.

Now, open access operators are different.

The idea is that they bring in competition at no cost to the taxpayer and they improve the situation for travellers. And the most perfect example is on the East Coast main

line. On the East Coast main line, the main train operator is actually the state-run L-N-E-R, London-Northeastern Railway.

And they do a sterling job linking, well, the main core of the line is London to York, to

Newcastle, to Edinburgh.

They do that pretty much every half hour.

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