Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I'm speaking to you from extraordinarily busy Waterloo Station.

This is the main departure point for southwestern railways to Surrey, to Hampshire, to Dorset, to Wiltshire and so on.

But today it is also the main departure point for the West.

I've been covering on this sad day of Her Majesty's State Funeral, the travel disruption,

and, well, one of the key hubs of London's transport

connections with the rest of the country has been closed effectively all day. London Paddington

Station had a very serious problem with overhead electric wires for the very first thing this morning.

And there have been no trains running in or out at all.

It's the concern of network rail, which owns the infrastructure, and they are desperately trying to repair the overhead lines nobody

knows why this has happened although that will most certainly be something that people will be

looking at but as a result nothing moving in and out of paddington station therefore the

the the alternative route has always been the train from

London, Waterloo to Reading. The trouble is, it's a busy day already. There are many people

who will be wanting to travel on those trains and suddenly thousands upon thousands of extra passengers

also want to make that journey. So I'm looking here, I can't quite see the end of it,

but I'm looking down at the line of people stretching from the area of Waterloo Station

platforms 20 to 24 and they it hasn't moved for quite a while

the queue just keeps getting longer stretching across Britain's busiest railway station

everyone waiting very calmly considering the scale of disruption.

I've been here for about 10 minutes.

I haven't seen it moved at all.

Presumably that's because they are waiting to get extra trains running.

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