Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Friday the 15th of March and as you may have heard I'm at a railway station.

West Ealing actually west of London, about five miles or so from London, Paddington.

And I'm with Mark Hotwood. He is the managing

director of Great Western Railway. And Mark, we're here for really quite a significant event.

Can you tell us what's happening? Yeah, it's an exciting day for us at Great Western Railway. Here at

West Ealing, we have our branch line that runs to Greenford.

It normally collects in and out of the Elizabeth line. It's the last remaining diesel train

that operates entirely in London. And we're using the line to test some new technology. We've taken a

old London underground district line train and we fitted it with batteries

and we've also fitted the track at West Ealing with fast charging equipment.

And our intention is to operate this train up and down the branch line with battery power.

But then when the train gets to the end of the

line it will charge the batteries top up the battery every half an hour in its

turnaround time to keep the batteries sufficiently charged to have the train out

all day and it will run on electric power even though this is not an electrified railway.

So I think it's exciting to have this technology in use. Of course our customers want to be able

to travel on the train knowing that it's environmentally friendly, that we're not pumping dirty diesel

emissions into the air. And I think this trial, if it's successful and we think it will be,

will show people that that's possible.

And then, Simon, we'd like to take this technology and roll it out on other branch lines.

In GWR, we have more branch lines than anyone else.

...