Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It is Monday the 22nd of January and my goodness, what a difficult start to the working week

after an awful weekend in particular Sunday for tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of passengers.

I'm at London Kings Cross Station where, well, unfortunately, you're not able at the moment to catch a train to or from Scotland,

due to Scotland's railway being completely closed as I report to you at 8 o'clock on Monday morning.

That is likely to continue at least until lunchtime.

We have from here additional problems because of damage to overhead lines between Edinburgh and Newcastle.

Elsewhere on the railway, actually, if you're outside Scotland, things are getting back to normal.

Bear in mind that any Anglo-Scottish services aren't likely to be running anytime soon,

and Transparent Express has got a big do-not travel between Carlisle and Glasgow and Edinburgh,

a warning. The main problem is actually on the London to Brighton line between Croydon and Gatwick.

That is blocked due to overrunning engineering works,

which is going to cause problems for tens of thousands of commuters

and indeed airline passengers hoping to get to

and from Gatwick. And talking of flying, well, what misery we have seen. So let's just be

absolutely clear about what has been happening. We have seen over 100 cancellations in and out of London Heathrow yesterday.

Most of them on British Airways, short-haul domestic and European flights, but also airlines

including Aer Lingus, Luftanzer, KLM, Scandinavian Airlines also affected.

Of course, you've got very high winds. That reduces the so-called flow rate.

That means that planes have to land more slowly or they have to allow more space between them.

That causes delays because of course Heathrow is pretty much full.

Gatwick actually didn't have too bad a time, but it was elsewhere that we saw the real problems.

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