Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder speaking to you from a very busy and slightly grumpy Waterloo Station.

That's because we've got signalling problems and lots of trains just looking across here.

Yeah, there's a 40 minute delay on the train to Windsor.

The train to Reading is cancelled.

It's all quite muddled.

And that's because, of course, things have gone slightly wrong with the infrastructure.

But I don't want to talk about this afternoon.

I want to talk about Christmas, because many people have got in touch with me saying that they want to plan their rail travel over Christmas, in particular long journeys generally to see loved ones and they are finding it difficult to book.

And so I want to home in on where the problems are and what you can do about it.

Now, it's very salient that there should be a problem with signaling in the Barnes area today

because that just shows we've got a very ancient infrastructure here on the railways.

It's actually run by network rail who are based right here in

London Waterloo and it requires constant care and attention. Traditionally a lot of that has

happened at weekends until the COVID crisis very much you would see much more travel from Monday to Friday

and therefore the weekends were clearly the time when that should be happening. I think things have

turned round but weekends are still generally the preferred time for engineering work. So one reason why you might be looking at, say, the weekend of the 17th and 18th of December,

the big pre-Christmas weekend and seeing, well, there's no tickets on sale, no advanced

tickets on sale.

Well, that's because, very simply, network rail in a lot of cases,

has not signed off what trains can run that day. Depending on which system you're using,

you might well see that, oh yeah, the trains from Manchester, from Birmingham, from Preston,

from Glasgow are all seen to be running, but I'm being quoted

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