Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, on a historic train ride.

Yes, I am aboard the 1017 Elizabeth Line departure from London Paddington on Tuesday the 20th of September.

The reason it's historic is that it's the first train to leave that terminus for 28 hours.

Yes, at around 6am on Monday morning, the 19th of September, overhead wires in the Hayes and Harlington area,

which we're approaching quite soon. And by the way, I apologise for the noises off from this train.

There we are. Overhead wires came down nearly two miles of them, and six trains got tangled up in them.

Passenger trains.

The passengers were allowed out, and they were all safe within a couple of hours, but it did mean that on the day of the Queen's State funeral, there were no trains on one of the key lines in and out of the capital.

There are basically four lines running between London Paddington and Reading, then carrying

on from there to South Wales, to the west of England, Bristol, Bath and also to

Somerset, Dorset and Cornwall. And all four of those lines were blocked for, well, effectively

28 hours. It was called a substantial de-wirement and they're still trying to figure out what went

wrong. Was it something in the so-called pantograph which is the thing which collects

electricity from the top of the train to allow it to run? Or was it possibly just faulty equipment or by some chance vandalism we

still don't know and it will take a while to find out meanwhile trains are

sort of getting back to normal we're running a little bit behind schedule on this train, but that sounds quite understandable, given it's the first one.

I've not seen anything else coming back in.

And even when services are properly restored, well, they're not going to be fully restored. What's going to happen is that

the fast tracks over to my left will be running without electricity. So it'll just be diesel services.

Now, for strange historic reasons, all Great Western Railway trains are so-called by mode,

the express trains anyway. So they've got huge diesel engines and they run off electricity. So they can actually cope with this. It's normally

a complete pain having buy-mode trains because they're extremely expensive and thirsty. But

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