My apologies for this aren't going today. I have no idea why they've not started

being trains up in the Charing Cross Branch. There can't be out many trains that we've set

here this long so I've only apologise and thank you all for your patience.

Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder, Thursday

the 7th of December and a slightly unusual introduction to today's podcast.

That was the very good and very long-suffering driver of a tube train,

which I had the misfortune to be on last night,

simply trying to get through from southwest London to central London on the northern line.

My goodness, it was busy, of course.

This was the day of a rail strike that wiped out almost all southwestern railway trains.

As a result of that, well, the tubes were particularly busy.

You might not know the southern part of the Northern Line, but it serves some modern station,

and it's really a kind of hub for all sorts of destinations in Surrey and South West London.

So the closure for an hour was doubly damaging.

People had switched from rail to tube and then started going nowhere.

I have no idea what caused the problem exactly. There was talk of a points failure in

Camden Town. There were trains heading south, really quite a lot of them, and I simply didn't

understand how you can have so many trains going south and nothing going north.

The delay being an hour.

Anyway, transport for London, I asked them what had caused the problem and if they could give me any more information about it.

They've not responded.

But while I was part of that tube full of travellers wondering what was going on and losing

...