Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder, the last one of the week, and it's Friday the 7th of October, and I'm once again at a railway station, of course I am.

I've just been across to see what's happening at London St. Pancras International, East Midlands Railway trains very seriously affected by a strike.

Same across over at Great Western Railways in and out of London Paddington.

And so bad is it that I don't think there's anything west of Plymouth and the only trains to Swansea from London are during the

afternoon. A very, very messy week. It's been the worst since the 1980s in terms of the

amount of disruption for travellers. Don't forget we had a strike last Saturday. That continued to have an impact on Sunday. Monday was sort of

okay Tuesday things started being cancelled. The head of a train driver's strike that carried on

with its impact all day on Wednesday. Thursday, Friday we've had some more local disputes but

with large numbers of cancellations and here we are on the eve of another

national rail strike just to remind you what that will mean effectively

half the network is closed down completely because of the network rail

signal as not being on duty management and non--union people will be signaling the other half of the

network but trains are going to be fairly rare lots of strikes of course within individual 14 of them

train operators so it's going to be messy that The mantra is, is your journey absolutely necessary?

Because if it isn't, please don't try to travel. Well, I'm going to be slightly counterintuitive

and I'm going to say, if you've got to get somewhere and there's train running, I really think

you should get them. Part of anything else. You will be sorting out your transport problems

and you will also be helping to do a microscopic amount to mend the appalling state of the railways

in terms of how much money they have lost. But there's also the concern that a lot of trains are being shown as absolutely full when they are not.

And that means that the rail industry is putting people off.

Now, let me just remind you, even though you probably know, how it works in the UK in terms of trains. We do not do what they do in France, in Spain,

in Italy. We don't say if you're travelling, particularly on an express service, you have to

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