Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 10th of June. There's an election quite soon. I'm really keen to know what the major political parties say about transport, because clearly it is an absolutely critical issue, mobility for millions of us, and yet it's not featured in the election campaign

to any extent so far. Now, the parties haven't come out with their manifestos yet, but somebody

has, and that is the Railway Industry Association, I'm glad to say. I'm even more glad to say

that I'm here with the chief

executive, Darren Kaplan, and the policy director, Rob Cook. So thank you for joining me. Darren,

first of all, I think if I asked the typical listener, what do you think of the railways?

They say they're in a right old mess and they're getting worse. Discuss. Well, thank you. Great starting question.

We're positive about rail in the rail industry association.

There's been a pandemic, there's been a difficult recovery,

but actually passenger numbers are getting back close to where they were in 2019, 2020,

and that was the second highest on record.

So we're comparing to a very vibrant time before COVID.

I'm just going to have to heckle there, sorry.

Yeah, absolutely right.

There's a couple of reasons why passenger numbers are doing well.

Partly it's the effect of the Elizabeth line people switching from some of the London undergrounds.

But even if you say, yeah, we're pretty much back to 100%, that's passenger numbers.

It's not revenue. Revenue's falling off a cliff because people aren't commuting from

Stevenage and Woking and Basilden to central London in the numbers they were.

Well, on the Elizabeth line, we think roughly about 10% of those passion numbers off Elizabeth line,

but 40% of those are new passengers. They weren't transferring from TFL. So you might be 5% or 6%

lower than the overall figure, but actually it's still, and they're still passengers. They're

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