Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Friday the 16th of August and I'm back at London-Euston Station, the hub for the West Coast

Mainline to West Midlands, North West England, North Wales and Southern Scotland.

But I'm not here to report on more strikes. West Midlands, North West England, North Wales and Southern Scotland.

But I'm not here to report on more strikes by train drivers.

I'm here to report on the fact that we almost certainly won't get any more in England and Wales for a while. And that's because, well, Louise Haig, the new transport secretary, was as good as her word

when she said, when I took this job, I said I wanted to move fast and fix things, starting by

bringing an end to rail strikes. And that's what she's done. The deal which the train driver's union Aslef was always going to accept

and has indeed recommended to its members that they do accept is a no strings pay deal that will mean that they get in total 15% for the three years from 2022 to 2025. That's actually after a couple of

years of no pay rises at all during the COVID pandemic. And so compared with 2019, going back

five years, they will be slightly worse off in terms of the level of inflation. But it means the average

salary of a train driver without overtime will go up from 60,000 pounds to 69,000 pounds, and they

will also get a good slab of cash, maybe £6,000, in fact, dated wages in their next pay packet.

The union says this is a good offer and they will be voting on it from the 28th of August

but I think it is absolutely certain that it will be accepted.

And that means an end to three years of rail strikes which have made life an absolute

misery for millions of travellers. It's calculated that one day a week on average over the past three years has been disrupted because of strikes by train drivers or indeed the overtime bans which

have very damaging effect because so many train companies depend on drivers working overtime to run

their full service so it's terrific it was interesting when i talked to m Wheeler nearly a year ago. He is the general

secretary of Aslef. He said it's going to take a change of government to settle this dispute.

And I thought at the time, well, that's ridiculous. Of course, it seemed then we would have over a year of a

government. I couldn't see how we could have yet more strikes, but they did

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