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

It's Tuesday the 7th of May and I'm at a very quiet London Waterloo.

Normally at this time thousands of commuters every minute would be streaming from trains,

maybe into the underground, maybe some walking across the bridge

into the centre of London, but today it's pretty quiet. That's because we are now into the

third summer of strikes by train drivers belonging to the Aslef Union. Today, South Western Railway, which normally runs in and out of here,

many hundreds of trains in a day, is going to have very, very few. There's a couple of services

to Woking and to Basingstoke. St. Pancras, you can go to Luton on Thameslink, but again, that's all you can do.

London, Liverpool Street is pretty quiet apart from a few skeleton links on Greater Anglia.

Generally, the whole picture looks pretty miserable. The idea is to prevent all the people who've been on

a bank holiday weekend returning to work on Tuesday

and so far they seem to be doing pretty well.

Tomorrow it's the turn of the intercity train operators, many of them and also train companies

in the Midlands.

So, Avanti West Coast, East Midlands Railway, West Midlands Railway, Chorten, Cross Country,

Great Western Railway will all be going on strike.

The idea is to knock out any prospect of a long distance journey.

And then on Thursday it's the town of the north of England that's Transpennine

Express and northern won't be running any trains LNER will be running a shuttle service between

Edinburgh via Newcastle and York to London about one third of the normal number of trains. So it's a pretty bleak picture all in

all and I've been talking to the General Secretary of the train drivers union, Asleff. He is

Mick Wheelan and this is what he had to say. Well, that strangely enough, with the amount

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