Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder once again on a train.

And that's something to be celebrated because this day a year ago, well, there were very few trains running.

You might recall 21st of June 2022 was the first day of national rail strikes since the 1980s.

Since then, well, the dispute involving members of the RMT union

and indeed the train drivers union, ASLF, working for over a dozen train operators

operators, including the one I'm on, the Great Western Railway, the dispute

has got more and more bitter. It's about pay, of course. The unions say that they deserve

a decent pay rise without strings. And it's really those conditions which are at the centre

of the dispute. And it's reached, well, as you're

here from my discussion with Mick Lynch, the General Secretary of the RMT Union, something

of a deadlock.

But first, I asked, was he expecting a year ago that this dispute would last so long?

We knew and we told our members at the beginning this would be a long-term dispute and they needed to dig in and we would take it responsibly. So we didn't, we haven't rushed at it. Our members have voted three times to renew the mandate and they've done so convincingly as good at the end as it was at the beginning

or as good recently as it was at the beginning. So we don't want to be here a year in, we want to get a settlement.

We're hopeful that we'll get one. We're available all at the time to talk about a settlement and negotiate a deal,

but there isn't one available. The government have locked the dispute down

and have gone on to radio silence, I'm afraid.

Right, so we're talking here about stalemate, I think that's a fair conclusion.

Your members have typically, I think, 28 days of strikes, typically lost £1,000 if they're on 31,000 a year.

Are you going to be continuing industrial action?

And will it be more strikes of the sort that we've seen over the past year?

Yeah, well, we don't know how much individual members have lost.

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