Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and that strange music,

the sort of thing that you might hear when you're walking into a theme park is actually what you hear when you walk into the preview of the Grand Egyptian Museum in, well, just on the outskirts of Cairo.

I'm just looking across at a marvelous obelisk many thousands of years old.

But actually, and this is a kind of occupational hazard, I suppose.

Oh, and there's the great pyramid of key ops over there.

I've actually got to talk about rail strikes because I was

on my way here when suddenly the Aslef Trade Union representing train drivers revealed the next stage

in its long and bitter dispute over pay and working conditions. There is going to be another sequence of strikes.

They are going to be affecting the 14 train operators that work with Aslef. They're all the big

train operators intercity, London commuter services, big regional operators.

But unlike the 14 previous strikes by the train drivers, and I'm sorry about the slightly intrusive music here,

they are going to be rolling strikes across the country. And the whole idea is that they will be targeting

a different part of the country every day from December almost every day from September

the 2nd December the 2nd that's the Saturday to Friday December the 8th and there's also an overtime ban which is covering both ends of that.

It's going to run from the 1st to the 9th of December and that will cause more disruption depending on

how dependent each rail firm is on.

Train drivers working overtime, some of them very highly dependent.

So the thought behind this is, well, we want to keep up the campaign, talking to the

General Secretary of the ASLF Trade Union, Mick Wheelan.

He believes that this is something that

is going to keep going until there's a change of government, which may be some time. And they

want to keep the pressure up. They have been striking far less than the RMT union, which of course

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