Hello, welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Thursday the 13th of February.

Just a thought if there's anybody to whom you think you should send Valentine's greetings.

You have, well, less than 24 hours. You're welcome. Anyway, that's not important right now.

What is, is what's happening at London Kings Cross. I'm at the hub for the East Coast

Main Line which runs from here to Yorkshire, North East England and Scotland. I'm staring at

the board of departures from this station because they are disappearing. Just over to my left

is platform 9 and 3 quarters, the mystical platform

from which the Hogwarts Express departed in the Harry Potter series. But on this vast departure screen,

which stretches from the Sunderland train on the left and all the way through to the Leeds train

covering an hour

and 40 minutes worth of departures, there's a new development. Trains are going to disappear. Three minutes

before the train is due to Descartes, if it's one of the intercity trains from platforms 0 to 8.

Now, you might be thinking, hang on, why is there a platform 0?

Well, there's a platform 9 in 3 quarters, which, spoiler alert, isn't a real platform.

But Platform 0 was added later on, and other stations have done this.

Cardiff, Doncaster, for example, people who do the extension have the choice of

either renumbering all platforms, which is not going to be great because so many people are used to them,

or coming up with an alternative, and that is to make it a platform zero. They could, of course,

just call it, well, here, it would need to be platform 12, but then it would go 12,

12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And while they do that in some places in Germany, they don't do it here.

The reason that they are doing this, according to Network Rail, is because otherwise people

would run for their trains. We don't want people running. We don't want them to delay the train.

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