Hello, this is Simon Calder and you are listening to the latest independent travel podcast.

Thank you for joining me on today another train and this is one of the relatively few trains

which in the event of a national rail strike will not necessarily be cancelled.

I'm on the Thameslink route through the heart of London.

I've just left St Pancras International Station.

By the way, the finest railway station probably in the world.

And I'm heading to London Blackfriars which is probably the second

best railway station in the world straddling the River Thames but there's an awful lot of people

who are waking up to the news that the RMT union members have voted overwhelmingly to strike in their doing so in their

dispute over jobs, over pay over conditions. The result came out late last night.

More than 40,000 railway workers voted. About 25,000 of them or so were from network rail,

which runs the infrastructure, including crucially the signaling.

And then there were many from the train operating companies.

Not all the train operators, but certainly many of the key ones, so

Avanti West Coast, Greater Anglia, GWR, LNER, Northern.

Thank you.

...change here for the Circle, Hannesmithon City and Metropolitan Lines.

And if you are working for Transport for London, you might note that that announcement didn't include the Elizabeth line, which I know for a fact, joins the network here.

That's not important right now. What is, is when a strike could take place.

And by the way, it is not going to affect directly Great Northern, Thameslink, Southern or Gatwick

Express trains, but they could, like everybody else, be hit by a strike by network rail signalers.

And that would mean that they are simply not able to run on the key lines if that were to happen I understand that

...