The rail chaos caused by the RMT is now beyond farcical

 With yet more strikes coming up and yet more journeys ruined, all passengers want is to travel on time without spending a small fortune

Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/08/23

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Another bank holiday, another train strike. Because heaven forfend that anybody should be able to get away easily for their long weekend, perhaps using a mode of transport that doesn’t entail sitting for hours in a traffic jam on the M1. But no, Saturday saw another strike by the wretched RMT, affecting all 14 main train operators on a weekend when 14 million drivers were also planning to hit the roads. 

“We want a decent pay rise” whined Mick Lynch (current salary £84,174, plus benefits), who also claimed that “we’re not greedy” (yeah, right) and that the RMT is “not prepared to fund these very modest pay rises through... cuts to the services that will affect our members, but also affect the travelling public”.

How the hell does he think the travelling public are not going to be affected if they can’t actually travel? The chaos caused by the RMT and its ilk is now beyond farcical: the year to June has seen 25 days of strikes, costing the economy an estimated £2billion. The railways were already losing £10million a day. 

More strikes are planned for this coming Friday and Saturday, from the RMT and Aslef (whose union leader, Mick Whelan, earlier this year turned down an offer which would take train drivers’ pay to £65,000 a year) – and will doubtless continue to occur as the year goes on. 

Meanwhile we, the passengers, just want to get to our destination, preferably on time and without it costing a small fortune. 

Having recently moved to York, while continuing to work two or three days a week in London, I have been taking a lot of trains. If I travel off-peak (which entails travelling a day earlier than I need to be there), book in advance and use a railcard, I can get a return ticket for about £50. If I simply turn up on the day, the price can run into the hundreds of pounds.

I found this out the hard way recently when, travelling on a strike day, my train had been cancelled, so I’d got on the next available one. Unfortunately, although I’d bought my original train ticket through the LNER website, the cancelled train was being run by a different operator (on the same train line), so the conductor made me buy a new ticket, “generously” allowing me to use my railcard. 

It cost triple what I’d originally paid – even though my booked train had been cancelled. 

If I were to buy an annual season ticket, meanwhile, it would cost me SEVENTEEN THOUSAND POUNDS. And the government wants us to get out of our cars and use public transport. What a joke.