November 23rd - The Northumberland Town Put On The Railway Map This Winter
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Simon Calder hits the rails today, reporting from Morpeth, possibly the only northern town in Britain that's had good news around rail travel of late. LNER has been the train company ferrying passengers up to Edinburgh but it now has competition with the new "easyjet of the rails", Lumo - but why has this happened here and what has it meant for Morpeth?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Mm, picnic. What does one take to a picnic? Crisps, dips, sausage rolls. No, come on, think outside the box. |
| 0:11.2 | Mm, napkins? What are you, the mum? No, something a bit more exciting. Something like, I'll have those red scratch cards, please. Add some play with National |
| 0:25.6 | Lottery Scratch cards. Search Dream big, play small, rules and procedures apply, players must be 18 or over. |
| 0:34.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're dreaming of a great escape or actually making plans. Today, as you may have heard, I'm at a railway station, but a very specific one, Morpeth in Northumberland, which was put on the railway map this winter. |
| 0:57.7 | I'll be talking about competition between trains if I've got time before my next train in about |
| 1:05.7 | seven minutes to Edinburgh. Of course, this podcast is completely free, |
| 1:13.9 | as is my weekly travel email. |
| 1:16.2 | Do feel free to subscribe at independent.co.uk forward slash newsletters. |
| 1:24.3 | The historic station of Morpeth, which I'm currently looking at, is a beautiful 19th century building. |
| 1:32.7 | It's here on the East Coast mainline, which is the UK's premier railway. |
| 1:38.7 | It runs from London Kings Cross via York and Newcastle to Edinburgh. |
| 1:46.2 | And the main train operator on it is L-N-E-R. |
| 1:52.0 | That is actually one of those rare things, which is a government-owned company. |
| 1:58.5 | It's run effectively by the Department for Transport and it is run very well indeed |
| 2:05.6 | with a proper business focus and delivering great service and good fares. But it has a new |
| 2:13.7 | competitor, Lumo, which is a subsidiary of First Group, based in Aberdeen, where that last |
| 2:22.3 | train was just going to. It's an interesting transport company, which has mostly been doing |
| 2:30.1 | franchised rail and buses, offering, for for example it's in partnership with |
| 2:36.3 | Trenitalia on the West Coast mainline with Avanti it also possibly in your |
| 2:42.0 | town or city runs an awful lot of buses in the UK and it's got interest right |
| 2:46.9 | across the world but five years, the Department for Transport said, |
| 2:52.9 | right, we are going to have a competition to decide who is going to run so-called open access |
... |
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