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

It's Monday the 3rd of November and I've spent quite a lot of the past 24 hours at London Kings Cross Station.

The reason is the falling knife attack that we saw on Saturday night on a train from Doncaster to London. The train

is still at Huntingdon Station in Cambridgeshire as police investigate. I really want to pay

tribute to the professionalism of the LNER train crew and the network rail staff, who managed

to divert the train from the fast track through Huntington Station to the slow track and

the platform at Huntington Station.

That meant that police could attend very, very swiftly, and as a result,

well, I have no doubt that lives were saved. Of course, thoughts with the people who were hurt

in the attack, and everybody who was involved from what was an extremely distressing incident.

It's raised questions about what security is in place on

trains. Well, the answer is not much. CCTV cameras, of course, a standard on-board trains,

but passengers are vulnerable to attackers. If you're in a confined space travelling at 125 miles an hour as that train was,

then it is very difficult. Just across the road from here, I'm actually looking across at London

St. Pancras International, where all Euro star passengers and their baggage is checked before

they depart for Paris, for Brussels, for Amsterdam.

That's because the Channel Tunnel is perceived as a key terrorist target.

For trains within the UK, though, we have British Transport Police patrols,

but the force has fewer than 3,000 officers, and that's with around 24,000 trains a day, 5 million

passenger journeys.

The British Transport Police says that patrols will be stepped up and actually travelling

around other London stations.

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