Hello everyone and welcome to the Independent Daily Travel podcast with me Simon Calder on the 4th of May, a red letter day.

I'm still in the land that time forgot. That's the far south-western corner of Portugal.

But I want to talk about the line that time forgot, the Elizabeth

line, the latest addition to London's infrastructure, because we finally heard today that in 20 days

time on the 20th of May, the new line will be opening. Well, parts of it will,

anyway. We have an extraordinary situation with the Elizabeth line, which was called Crossrail.

That's the name of the engineering project. And I think even by the standards of public infrastructure projects, this one was pretty lousy.

It was due to open in December 2018, all the way from Redding and Heathrow in the West, through to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east.

Transforming London, delivering a huge range of improved travel opportunities,

much faster journeys, and all of it based on this amazing new tunnel

through the centre of London from Paddington calling at Bond Street,

Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street and Whitechapel and offering people the

opportunity to get the capacity they need, take the strain off the central line and just generally improve everything.

That was the idea and it will happen, I promise it will.

But we are going to see, I'm afraid, the system gradually creaking into action.

When you look at what they are proposing 41 months on, it is

boggling in its, I was going to say, ineptitude in its uncertainty. So when trains start,

they are only going to be running from Paddington to Abbey Wood.

And yes, that will take in the opportunity to go to Canary Wharf.

It will link Woolwich in south-east London.

And those improvements will be massive.

It will be a terrific thing, but unfortunately, you're not going to be able to go any further

...