Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast to bring you the latest news on travelling,

whether you're just dreaming of a great escape or actually away and having the time of your life.

You might tell from the acoustic in the background that I am at, another railway station.

Yes, this time the Waterloo station in London.

Used to be before the coronavirus pandemic,

absolutely the busiest transport terminal in Europe.

Certainly isn't, as I speak to you, just a handful of passengers.

But I'm here because I'm looking across to the old

Euro star platforms. Now, if you were an Euro star passenger between when it started in 1994

and when it moved to St. Pancras in 2008, all the trains went in and out of here and there was a beautiful

building, lovely arch devised curling around from being parallel to the Thames to sort of pointing

in the general direction of France, I guess, and that carried the four Euro star platforms. Now, those platforms have

finally been brought back to use and they are all part of the South Western Railways franchise.

It serves the bit that goes out towards Windsor and Reading. But I'm here because I'm very excited about rail travel

going back to the way it was. Not in the sense of British rail sandwiches, but in Europe.

And a particular idea that has come in from French railways. Now, SNCF, the French National Railways,

is an interesting operator. It actually owns a lot of Eurostar. It's had to pump lots of money in

to keep that London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam organisation alive.

But it also does some innovative things in order to try to keep ahead of the competition,

or at least in tune with the competition.

And you will know that of course the French had the first proper high-speed trains in Europe,

the TGVs running between Paris and Lyon originally well they are now going back

...