Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape, looking forward to one or actually away and having the time of your life.

As you will probably have discerned, I'm a huge fan of trains. I've never owned a car and I find generally

the service is pretty good. You will also be aware that fares went up this week by their

highest amount in the past nine years, although as the government is keen to point out, that is significantly

less than the current rate of inflation. But I wanted to bring you up to date with the engineering

work that's going to be happening in the next couple of months, because an awful lot of it

could affect your journey, therefore you need to be

prepared so you can work around it and I will also be mentioning the thorny question of why

engineering work takes place at times you might think are quite busy anyway from this coming

weekend western cornwall yes the line to penance is going to be cut off for nine days and that's because

network rail is renewing track on the main line in the area around truro the city that is Cornwall's county town. So over this

weekend, no trains between St Auster and Penzance from the whole of next week. So the 7th to the

13th, no trains at all west of Truro. That's slightly unusual in that it's a closure which is happening away from

public holidays, whereas over Easter you will see, as is traditional, some of Britain's busiest

intercity lines are going to be disrupted. In particular, London-Euston hub for the West Coast

mainline to the West Midlands, to North West England, to North Wales, Southern Scotland.

It's going to be completely closed from Good Friday to Easter Monday. That's the 15th to the 18th of April,

if you've got your calendar.

Lots of work going on, well, partly track renewal and signaling and so on, but also

London-Euston is the location for the terminus of HS2 as well.

And there will be work going on involving that high speed line,

which ultimately is going to take us from London to Birmingham and onwards to Manchester.

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