Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder Friday the 27th of September.

I am speaking to you once again from Waterloo Station in central London.

Many people say it's still the busiest station in Britain. It always was and then the Elizabeth

line opened, Liverpool Street and Paddington suddenly found that lots of people who have been

travelling underground switched to the Elizabeth line and that counted as a proper railway line and

therefore their numbers went up. That's not important right now.

What is is the fact that people are not able to use the Wi-Fi here at the headquarters

actually of Network Rail or at 10 other London stations or at a number of other big stations around the UK because

network rail looks after the stations at Bristol Temple Meads Birmingham New Street

Manchester Piccadilly Leeds and Glasgow Central and Edinburgh Waverly if it's a big

station then network rail will look after it.

And Network Rail will also normally provide a very good Wi-Fi system.

I have been using it for years. It is an extremely robust, reliable, fast and effective Wi-Fi system, which is completely at odds, I find,

with the Wi-Fi you get at smaller stations, where it tends to be the train operators who

are running it and indeed on the trains. And, well, my goodness, I was on a cross-country train from Birmingham to Bristol a couple of days ago

and it was a bit like going back to the 1990s in Kazakhstan in terms of connectivity it was pretty hit and miss and yeah you can tether to your phone a lot of people will do that but

well frankly i blame the victorians because they did not design a rail network with connectivity in mind at all

i mean you could have thought if you were building the railways nearly 200 years ago,

well, yeah, probably people are going to need decent 4G and 5G reception.

And while we're here, let's put in some paperwork, some pipes for the Wi-Fi, but that didn't happen.

So we are stuck with what we have got.

A really interesting situation that's happened with this so-called hack of the system.

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