Hello and welcome to the final independent travel podcast of the week. It's Friday the 5th of May.

My wife and I wish you and your families a wonderful coronation weekend.

Wherever you are travelling, we hope you have a safe and pleasant journey.

And remember, please mind the gap.

Well, that is the message that awaits travellers on all 2,500 stations around the UK rail network,

as well as Transport for London stations.

And a very welcome message it is.

But when the king speaks of minding the gap,

does he perhaps have in mind,

not the bit between the train and the platform,

not the bit between the royal family and the rest of us,

but the enormous and extremely wide gap between the rail unions, the RMT and Asleff, the train drivers union, and the government represented, I guess, by the train operators whose jobs are stipulated by the Department for Transport and represented by the rail delivery group.

That's what I need to talk about today because overnight, as well as suddenly discovering that that announcement had been made, which is very welcome and exciting.

We also learnt that actually the RMT mandate has been extended.

This is basically the RMT going to its members as it has to do periodically to say do you want to continue the

industrial action now they could have said no they could have said actually we're

knackered we've done quite enough already and we haven't really got very far we honestly

don't think we're going to get a better offer

very much as our colleagues in the union working for Network Rail have done and they've settled

and therefore no we're not going to decide to change our, we're not going to carry on with

this campaign, but they didn't. And if you look at the response

from the RMT union, nailed it, they say, smashed it in fact. 91% of people said, yeah,

...