Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder on the hottest day in the history of ever, by all accounts, at least in the UK.

And I'm coming to you from Paddington Basin in London, the closest. I think that we get to a kind of Mediterranean lifestyle within

the capital, lots of barges and narrow boats to the left and the right, and a very, very

sultry evening sun, which is certainly cooling off just a little bit, but what a day

and what an impact on the railways. We already knew yesterday, of course, that the East Coast

mainline was going to be closed. As the day went on, well, late on, close to midnight, the decision

was taken that it wasn't just going to be closed for a few hours, it was going to be closed all

day. It was joined by the East Midlands Railway Link from London, St. Pancras International

to Leicester, to Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield.

We also, towards the end of the afternoon, saw the complete closure of Avanti West Coast.

Now, they had actually been running a good few trains, but then was a line side fire no doubt related to the

heat which they seemed unable to deal with also a fallen tree and so therefore a day that is best

forgotten I hope and let's hope that all the very good women and men who were involved in

running trains are all safe and well along with their passengers.

There's been actually quite a lot of trains getting through.

I was particularly impressed with a train left Birmingham Moore Street at lunchtime,

managed to arrive in London Mailibone. It was the Chilton line a couple of minutes ahead of schedule,

which kind of was rather against the run of play. Most other parts of the world, and that's a huge

goose just trying to take off and failing on the canal here.

Yet most other parts of the country, certainly Scotland had a really good day. There were some

delays on a minority of routes but actually the main problem was simply being disconnected from London,

whether or not that's a problem, is entirely up to you to say.

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