Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 21st of May.

There are three possible contenders with plans to compete against Eurostar from London to Paris and Brussels.

There's F.S. Italiani, the Italian State Railway Company, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group,

but there's a third contender as well, and this is Gemini Trains. We've learnt today that Gemini

is teaming up with Uber. Yes, that massive transport tech giant to promote the potential new service.

I'm delighted to be joined by Gemini's chief executive, Adrian Quine.

Adrian, what, first of all, are you planning?

Well, the plan really is to come up with a disruptor operator, a new operator that's going to take on Eurostar,

but also create new, you know, modal shift from other modes of transport. At the moment,

there is only one rail operator, Eurostat, and quite often it's quite expensive, and people

choose to fly. It seems to me utterly bonkers to be flying from London to Paris and London

to Brussels,

apart from the fact that it's not very green, it's taking up lots of slots which should be

for longer hauled planes. You know, rails should be the number one route between London

and Brussels and Paris and indeed beyond. So I think that is the purpose and I think there's a real

opportunity to grow the market.

The really interesting thing about Gemini compared with your rifles is that you plan to run trains from Stratford International.

Now, for people who don't know it, this is six miles down the line from St. Pancras International.

And it's a suburban station that was during the construction of high speed one fitted out to be able to handle passengers heading

for France and beyond. But it's only ever been used for domestic south-eastern trains

on the high-speed track to stations in Kent. What are you thinking,

Adrian? Well, the reason is that Stratford is actually a bit of a blank canvas. You're right. There are

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