Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcasts coming to you direct from the

centre of St Pancras International Station in central London. I'm here because I'm keeping an eye on all the train operators,

Euro star to Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels, East Midlands Railways to Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, Thameslink.

They are going to Brighton, wouldn't that be lovely? And also to Bedford, Cambridge, etc.

And I wanted to check out also what's happening across the road at London Kings Cross

because of course this is the first time that we have seen an extreme heat warning for

large parts of the UK mostly the less northerly parts of England and it's the first time we have seen a main railway line closed yes on Tuesday from noon until 8 p.m.

the East Coast main line which runs from London Kings Cross Fire Peterborough Gran, Grantham, Newark and all stations to Yorkshire

will be closed between London and Doncaster with the branch to Leeds and also the mainline north to York

also being closed. This is, as they say, very often these days, unprecedented. And I thought you might

like to know why it was happening on the East Coast mainline, but more broadly why you're getting

speed restrictions, which are causing massive problems here and everywhere else. We've already

got the East Midlands Railway Service

from on those mainline links through the East Midlands half and the issue is that

well unfortunately steel rails get even hotter than the outside air temperature up to

20 degrees hotter and therefore they are

under immense pressure they do expand like all elements don't write in if there's an element

which doesn't and therefore they are more likely to buckle under the stress of high speed trains

now the speed restrictions range from

90 miles an hour which isn't actually that far down from the restrictions

that we've seen on the normal speed 125 miles or 100 miles typically but they

more familiar figure is 60 miles an hour.

...