January 10th - What is the state of the railway?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rail passengers across Britain are experiencing the first days free of industrial action for weeks. The last of five days of strikes ended in the early hours of Sunday morning, with full services for the first time almost everywhere in the country.
The RMT union’s overtime ban, which has caused thousands of train cancellations in the past few weeks, is also over. But the long and bitter dispute drags on, which is why I wanted to bring you up to date on the state of the railway.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Tuesday the 10th of January. |
| 0:06.7 | If you're a regular listener, you may be wondering what happened to Monday the 9th of January. |
| 0:12.2 | Was it somehow deleted from the travel calendar? No, it wasn't. There was technical issues for which I take full responsibility and I apologise for that. |
| 0:24.2 | And as my punishment, well I've treated myself actually to a trip to one of the UK's loveliest stations. |
| 0:31.1 | This is London Malybone. |
| 0:33.6 | Now people of a certain age will say, isn't that the one that the Beatles filmed in in hard days night? |
| 0:41.6 | And it certainly is. |
| 0:43.1 | It's a wonderful old Victorian station, lots of red brick. |
| 0:48.0 | They tried at one stage in the 1970s to turn this into a bus station. They were going to rip up the tracks going northwest |
| 0:58.0 | from here and put a road down that would only be used by buses. That was thrown out, thankfully, |
| 1:05.0 | which means that you are now here to, you can enjoy the ambienceience you can certainly enjoy the amazing |
| 1:12.9 | Victoria and Albert pub where if you were kind of blindfolded and taken |
| 1:18.6 | there you think well this is a lovely kind of parlor sitting room saloon rather |
| 1:24.6 | than part of a busy railway station. |
| 1:28.3 | Anyway, the reason I'm here is because I'm talking about the flipping railways again |
| 1:32.3 | and in particular what is going to happen over the coming days and weeks. |
| 1:38.3 | And I'm here because the great celebration across the land is that Kidderminster is now connected with London once again, direct links and those are starting up. |
| 1:51.0 | There's one view out. |
| 1:52.0 | Oh, just looking across very soon and maybe we'll even hear the announcement for that. |
| 1:57.0 | We should cheer me up no end. |
| 1:59.0 | So where are we? We've had for members of the |
| 2:02.5 | RMT who worked for Network Rail 20 days of strike so far in the past 200 plus |
... |
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