Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast coming to you from my favourite

railway station anywhere in the world I'd say yes it's London St Pancras International

oh I love it partly because of the architecture but also because it has far better connections than anywhere else in Britain.

Look at this, 912, Margate via Canterbury, sandwich via Dover.

You've got Bedford, Luton, Brighton, Sheffield, Leicester, Nottingham and crucially, you have Eurostar.

This is the only international rail passenger station in the UK.

I'm looking at the Euro style departures board.

901 to Brussels via Leal.

1022 to Paris.

1104, Amsterdam, via Leal, Brussels and Russia Dam.

And there is the 1031 via Lille to Disneyland.

Yes, there is a direct train from here to taking two hours and a half, roughly, straight to the gates of Disneyland Paris.

For the last 26 years, this has been one of the great

benefits of Eurostar. Very early on after the channel tunnel passenger trains were

launched they realised well there's a fantastic high-speed rail bypass to the east of Paris, which calls it at Charles de Gaulle Airport and also at Man La Vallais, a kind of uninteresting, sorry, suburb to the east of Paris, but that happens to be the location for Disney's European adventure.

So it's been terrific.

Hundreds of thousands of passengers have benefited from the easy link.

And the bad news, I'm afraid, is that this is all going to stop.

From the 6th of June 23, there will be no trains to Disneyland, Paris from London.

Since I broke this story, a couple of days ago, it's been really interesting seeing the reaction.

In particular, a lot of people say this is nothing to do with Brexit. After the company had said, this is partly to do with Brexit.

Eurostar suffered enormously under the COVID restrictions, probably more than pretty much any other transport operator because of its network.

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