Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and well some welcome news in the rail dispute of a kind.

The RMT Union, which is the main rail union, has called off its strike that was expected to paralyze much of the rail network on the 16th of March.

That's a week on Thursday.

Now, just to be absolutely clear, that means that the strike we were expecting to happen on network rail will not be going ahead

but there will be strikes on 14 train operators as expected this broke well quite late last

night certainly was here in turkey which is where I am lucky enough to be at the moment.

Suddenly I was alerted to a message from the RMT union which had been sent out to its members saying,

well, network rail, all industrial action is suspended, book on for all shifts and work as normal. They say that earlier

today, this was Tuesday, an improved offer was received from Network Rail. The nationally executive

committee has taken the decision to suspend all industrial action to allow a referendum of you and your colleagues

to take place. So that means that the strike which was planned to take place on Thursday the 16th

of March is over and there was going to be a ban on overtime, rest day working and non-rusted

Sundays. That's all been cancelled and the members of the

union are due to book on for all shifts and work as normal. The general secretary of the RMT,

Mick Lynch, says, I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate you and your colleagues on your solidarity and steadfast commitment to the union during this dispute so far.

Well, this immediately made a number of people think, oh, the rail strikes are over and I'm

afraid that is far from the case, but we are in a place where it's going to be a

much much better 16th of March than we thought because that was the day that network rail

staff were being called out that means 5,000 signalers would not be at their posts that would mean

that the vast majority of trains in Scotland and in Wales

would be cancelled along with many, many others. So there are now going to be lots of trains

running pretty much as normal. And if you're travelling on, for example, Caledonian Sleeper, Grand Central, Hull trains, Lumo, those last three, of course, all on the East Coast mainline, Mersey Rail as well as Scott Rail and Transport for Wales.

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