Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 6th of March and I'm travelling and I think, probably over 100 miles an hour. Don't worry, I'm not cycling or driving. I'm on a train. Yes, once again, I don't really have much choice since I'm a non-car owner.

But I want to talk today about the North-South divide and how to overcome it.

What I mean by that is that the pricing for rail travellers between Midlands and north of England and, effectively, London, which is the main start or end point for vast number of rail journeys, is annoyingly expensive.

Once you get beyond, and this is travelling out from London, the kind of

outer suburban commuter area, then suddenly prices will go through the roof and that is

very annoying if you are a traveller.

Good boy and ladies and gentlemen shall arrive here at Loughborough.

Loughborough will be our next day, you should call.

And that gives you a bit of a clue about what I'm doing.

I'm actually on the, I was going to say, historic Thomas Cook line between Lester and Loughborough.

This is in 1841, the journey that he took a whole load of people on when he

was industrialising rail transport to make it affordable for the masses. And some would say that

since then the rail industry has done all it can to make rail unaffordable, particularly with the 5.9% price increase,

which took effect on Sunday. But actually it's easier than that. However, there is, if you are

travelling, say, between London and Manchester, then you can get pretty much to Milton Keynes for a reasonable price,

but going beyond that is suddenly going to, the price will go through the roof.

Same thing happens on other lines.

You can get maybe as far as somewhere like Stevenage or hitching on the East Coast mainline,

but after that then prices start to increase very rapidly.

And in order to avoid those very high fares, you have to be slightly creative. fortunately on the west coast main line it's very

straightforward you've got a couple of options from birmingham you can just hop on to children

railway which would always undercut the avanti west coast in in my experience, and also West Midlands Railway.

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