Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, coming to you from the heart of Paddington Station in central London.

The hub for the GWR line to Reading, to Cardiff, to Bristol, to Plymouth via Ex Exeter all sorts of possible train opportunities for you today even though there is a strike on and I just want to talk about the ideas around that there are no trains running if you are lucky enough to want to make a journey that is covered by the train companies

during the strike, there is a remarkably efficient service, I think. I had some terrible

problems on the line between London and Gatwick Airport today. Nothing to do with the strike, everything to do with the usual stuff falling over.

So I was hoping to catch an early morning Thameslink train to Gatwick Airport.

The shortage of drivers paid to that, so a whole load of us piled into an Uber, which sort of worked.

Next, coming back from Gatwick, the first train was cancelled because the crew couldn't get there.

The second one broke down at Red Hill, haven't we all?

And then eventually another train, which by then very crowded, picked us all up and took us rather slowly to London Bridge.

But that's the exception.

I've been round to Liverpool Street Station for East Anglia.

To Kings Cross, where actually a really impressive service,

38% of the normal schedule is running on the East Coast mainline to Yorkshire, to Newcastle, to Edinburgh. Midland mainline in and out of London,

St. Pancras is doing pretty well as well. They're running to, of course, Sheffield,

via Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, and that's all working. Also, at St. Pancras, you've got the

Eurostar links to Paris, to Amsterdam and to Brussels. So those are all kind of happening, as they

are supposed to, which is good news. Continuing around there, well, there's a little bit running on Chiltern railways from here

there's lots of stuff happening and then in the south of England it's a bit odd you can get

to Southampton but you can't get to Guilford and to Portsmouth you can get to Brighton

but nowhere else in on the Sussex coast and you can get to

Ashford International in Kent so Apache picture there are also some cross-country

trains running so you could get from say Newcastle to Bristol from Glasgow to Edinburgh but those are a little bit thinner

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