Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, somewhere in the west of England.

That means I am not too badly affected by Storm Babette, but there are many people from South Devon to North East Scotland who are being hit by this very wet and very severe storm.

I want to talk today about the scale of the disruption, what I'm seeing, and furthermore,

a couple of issues about your rights if you get caught up in it.

So let's start in eastern Scotland, the area really south from Aberdeen going as far.

Well, now I'm just seeing a map which includes Perth in the Red Alert area.

That's for very heavy rain.

And that is expected to begin around about 6pm tonight

and continue until noon tomorrow. That is goodness. 10 inches of rain in places on the hills

is expected an extraordinary amount of rain. The effects are being felt in many places.

Aberdeen Airport has seen, I'm calculating around about 20 cancellations in and out,

mainly on Logan Air, Scotland's airline, but also some on KLM and Widerot, the Norwegian airline, to and from Stavanger.

So lots going on or not going on there.

And then the trains, well, the seven routes, which ScotRail has cancelled completely today and tomorrow.

It says it hopes to get these lines which are basically

the ones you would imagine if you know that part of Scotland. So the line from Aberdeen down

through Dundee and onwards to Edinburgh. So lots and lots of closures there. The Scott Rail website has full

details. Ferries aren't having a great time. The Newcastle to Amsterdam ferry has been cancelled.

Northern Isles, that's North Link ferries to and from Orkney and Shetland, very heavily disrupted,

not expecting to see anything really in and out until Saturday.

And various parts of the Western Isles are also experiencing significant problems.

And so all you can do is, obviously, check your journey before you go and hope that you don't get caught up in maybe related, maybe unrelated problems.

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