Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and you might be thinking if you're kind enough to be a regular listener that I spend an awful lot of time at railway stations.

Well that's certainly the case today. You can hear a freight train going past and my train is due to go in five and a half minutes.

So let's see first of all if it's on time and secondly if I have finished what I have to say to you by then and I am looking at the state

of the railways and I'm really very despairing that's probably the world so I've based that on what I have seen so far this week. We're only up to

Wednesday and we saw new strikes being called by the RMT union. Now this very specifically isn't

aimed at passengers. It's the strike that begins at 6pm on Christmas Eve and

goes through to the early hours of the 27th of December very little impact on passengers in the

short term possibly quite a significant impact in the longer term because it's designed to

scupper more than 100 million pounds worth of engineering works that are going in.

And I guess that is a really, really unfortunate gesture from my point of view.

It means that the biggest rail union, the RMT, is so absolutely focused on winning its battle with, well, theoretically the train operators

and network rail, but ultimately with the government. They're so focused on that that they are

quite prepared to, as it were, damage the future of the railways in order to press home there what they would see as their advantage.

I've also, this morning, spent quite a lot of time watching and indeed going back and checking that I heard correctly

what happened with the Transport Select Committee. This Auguste committee, which I've actually got a lot of

time for, was meeting and interviewing Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary. Ironically, the previous

chair of the Transport Select Committee, the excellent Hugh Merriman, is now the rail minister.

He wasn't around. So what did Mark Harper have to say?

Well, he ran through all the reasons why reform on the railway is necessary. He talked about

every job on the railway being protected during the COVID pandemic with £300,000 of taxpayers' money.

That's the equivalent of the money that was pumped in to the railways.

Now, there is a perfectly valid argument to say, well, hang on, that was during COVID.

...