December 19th - Next rail strike to cause Christmas Eve cancellations
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm on a train yet again – the 100mph (average speed!) new nonstop from Coventry to London. But less than brilliant news about the extreme Christmas Eve cancellations caused by the next rail strike.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder coming to you at a speed of a guess 125 miles an hour. |
| 0:11.0 | Yes, I'm on a train you'll be astonished to learn and it's delayed. You'll be even more astonished to hear. |
| 0:20.0 | Yes, it's an Avanti West Coast train. |
| 0:23.8 | I'm talking today about what we are expecting to see between now and Christmas, and in particular on Christmas Eve, but I'm also trying to bring a little bit of good news. |
| 0:36.2 | So here's the score.mas eve is when another network rail |
| 0:42.2 | national strike starts and just so you know what you're expecting or what we are expecting |
| 0:49.0 | it's going to be six in the evening on christmas eve through to the morning of the 27th of December. |
| 0:56.0 | And the idea is, well, the union, the RMT, which is called 20,000 staff out on strike, |
| 1:04.0 | says that it wants to scupper all the engineering work that is taking place on Christmas Day and Boxing Day and they |
| 1:14.2 | weren't aiming at passenger services. Well, if they weren't aiming at passenger services, |
| 1:18.6 | they've been, well, slightly wider the mark. There is going to be massive cancellations. |
| 1:26.1 | We are seeing all of the normal boxing day schedule wiped out, |
| 1:31.7 | most of which actually involves Eurostar, about 20,000 travellers being told that their |
| 1:38.1 | trains are no longer going to be running. I talked to the union about this and I said, |
| 1:43.2 | hang on, I thought you weren't trying |
| 1:44.2 | to get at the passenger services and they said, this is entirely network rail. They should |
| 1:49.5 | have got people in to open the high speed line. And network rail said, well, we can't. This is |
| 1:55.1 | entirely the responsibility of you. You are going on strike. So, as usual the employers who are effectively the government |
| 2:04.9 | and the union on very different pages at the moment so urester bad services on christmas eve |
| 2:14.8 | unbelievable i've been looking at the last trains and the |
| 2:20.8 | RMT says it shouldn't have too many effects because services normally wind down early on |
| 2:27.8 | Christmas Eve and indeed they do but the railway network rail says no because of a combination of things the fact that every |
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