Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast on Thursday the 19th of January with me Simon Calder and if I sound chipper well I'm glad about that because I think one of the three long and bitter national rail disputes may possibly be close to a settlement.

Let me tell you why I'm optimistic.

For the past 10 days or so, the RMT union, the main rail union,

and the rail delivery group representing the 14 train

operators whose services are specified by the Department for Transport and therefore ultimately

whose pay deals are signed off by the government. Well, they've been deep in talks. Last time they were deep in talks,

I remember exactly where I was. It was like one of those great life-changing moments. No, I was

actually, I think, walking up a hill in Durham, of which there are many hills. And I talked to a

contact in the industry who basically just said,

yeah, well, there's this deal, and it's contingent on driver-only operation expansion.

And at that moment, I thought, well, well, that's no good then.

And quite within certainly hours, if not minutes, it had been duly rejected.

And some lots more strikes went ahead.

Now, let me be absolutely clear.

This is only one of the disputes.

And it involves the staff who work for train operators so that's everybody from

southern and southeastern and southwestern railway to northern trains to to lNER on the east coast

mainline avanti west coast on the west coast main line gwr going off to South Wales and two lovely west of England

and they're all the staff who do a whole multiplicity of jobs right across the railways

very very few of them drive trains almost all of those belong to the Aslef Union. So they're not the

people who have anything to do with the signals or the tracks or maintenance. That's all

network rail. And they are involved in separate talks. And they kind of were a bit closer to an

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