Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast, first of the week with me, Simon Calder.

And I've spent, I hope not like you, quite a lot of the weekend hanging around at a number of railway stations,

many of which have seen no trains at all because of a strike.

But buried in the many difficult stories about rail disruption and industrial action was just a small,

almost one-line comment made by southeastern.

Now this is a major commuter train operator.

It connects Kent, East Sussex,

South East London with the capital. Really important and I found generally a pretty good operator. They say as from December this year,

they will be removing first class. Now, bear in mind that already the javelin services,

those are the high speed trains that southeastern runs between Dover, Margate,

Ashford, Folkestone, Canterbury and London St. Pancras,

those are already one class only. I mean, they are

actually very stylish trains. You do pay a bit of a supplement to be on them compared with the

slow old ones. But I think most people are entirely happy with that. Shorter journeys, of course,

because they whizz along at 140 miles an hour um so that

they are just saying on our longer train journeys and that will be the so-called classic lines

going from london victoria via made stone to ashford um going from charing cross to dover and

fokston we're going to get rid of first class.

That's going to allow us an extra 11,000 seats every day, and that will be jolly good. And they furthermore

say, well, one reason we're doing this is because we've had a count and we've got four, sorry, forgive me,

28 season ticket holders,

annual season ticket holders who have got first class tickets. I imagine that southeastern is,

...