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Hello, it's Tuesday the 13th of July and thanks for joining me for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the Independent, currently on the road, or at least the railway speeding between Wigan and Preston, living the dream on the West Coast mainline.

Today, appropriately, I'll be talking about railfare reform.

Beneath the city of London, the bank is closing for four months

and is red to green feasible in Thursday's traffic light shuffle.

Of course, this podcast is completely free, as is my weekly travel email. You can sign up

at independent.com.com.com.org slash newsletters. Right, railfare reform is long overdue. Everybody

agrees that. The only question is, how are we going to sort it out? The system,

I don't need to tell you, is formidably complex and irrational. I'm travelling to Carlisle

on the English-Scottish border and I've obviously bought two separate tickets because it saves me

an absolute fortune.

There has to be, says Mark Smith, who's known as a man in seat 61, two clear objectives from

reforming rail fares. The first one is simply to make it easy to buy tickets, no more queuing

at stations.

You should be able to get them pretty instantly on apps.

And certainly there's ways that that is happening.

But the second and more difficult objective is to restore confidence in rail pricing.

What's happened since railfres were baked in at privatisation

...