Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder for Monday the 6th of February.

Well, an extraordinary development on the railways, nothing to do with a settlement, sadly, to the long-running industrial disputes,

but it has been revealed through the usual method that ministers use to communicate their

decisions to the British public, through a leaked or rather sourced article in the Telegraph.

This is all about how the return rail ticket is going to be scrapped.

That at least is the headline in the Sunday Telegraph.

Major reform set as Transport Secretary also commits to Boris Johnson's Great British Railways,

a new public body. But let's just look at the travel aspects of this. So clearly a special

advisor at the Department for Transport has briefed the telegraph to tell them that Rishi Sunak has

said that he will go ahead with long-awaited sweeping reforms of British railways.

This story says that Mark Harper is going to announce.

And by the way, this is me talking here.

He's going to do it in the Bradshaw lecture tomorrow I understand this is a regular

feature in the railway calendar and he's going to say yep we're going to have single leg pricing

so what is that well it's the very straightforward idea that you buy a ticket for a journey and it doesn't

matter whether you are coming back the same day, coming back within a month, never coming back,

flying back, getting a lift, getting a bus, really doesn't matter. This is absolutely at the

core of the low-cost airline business,

and it's been like that since 1995. And people have been agitating since then saying,

it'd be really good to do this on the railways, because at the moment we've got this

ludicrous situation where you can get a day return, for instance, from Brighton to London, and that might cost you

£25, and a signal would be £24.90. I mean, the whole thing is just mad. Similarly, for most

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