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

lovely surroundings of Kingscross Station, the southern hub of the East Coast mainline to

Yorkshire, North East England and Scotland. Right now, though, I am talking to the great

transport thinker and strategist Thomas Abelman, and I'm talking to the great transport thinker and strategist Thomas Abelman.

And I'm talking to him about mini Switzerland.

Now, this is coming to Derbyshire.

Does that mean that you'll be building lots of sharp mountains?

Does it mean that you will be offering a chalet accommodation and maybe selling overpriced drinks.

No, the Peak District is not Switzerland, but there's an awful lot we can learn from Switzerland,

and many Switzerland is about attempting to do that.

Okay, and this is all about transport in the Hope Valley.

And just to help people understand where that is, it's basically, if you draw a line

between Manchester and Sheffield across the Pennines, it kind of cars through there?

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a railway line in a valley. It has five small rural stations

within it. Those stations are surrounded by villages, but not immediately connected to the villages.

And that is an important piece of context, especially as this railway line runs every hour.

Because for the mini-Switzerland demonstrator project, which we'll talk about,

we needed to do this somewhere where there's an existing railway with rural stations,

with a train

service that runs every hour. That's the core of the Swiss railway system that we can then

build this demonstrator around. And what you are seeking to demonstrate is that if you can

improve bus connections to a regular train service, then actually you can put in meaningful public transport.

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