November 30th -Navigating the Rail Chaos: A December of Disruption Ahead
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today's podcast, I'm stationed at Manchester Piccadilly, exploring the impending rail challenges this December. From driver strikes to altered schedules, I'll break down what this means for UK travellers and how to best navigate the disruptions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's now Thursday the 30th of November, |
| 0:10.8 | which means that it's almost December and, well, I'm afraid I do need to talk to you about the |
| 0:18.3 | Advent calendar of disruption that begins on Friday the 1st of December. |
| 0:26.3 | And just as a reminder, it's not simply the industrial action, the schedule cuts, the engineering |
| 0:34.7 | works. When things are supposedly going as normal, well, I'm afraid there are |
| 0:40.9 | still all sorts of problems. I'm here at Manchester Piccadilly, which all week really has been |
| 0:46.9 | seeing short notice cancellations, Transpenine Express, one of those has just fallen over. |
| 0:57.4 | People were waiting on the platform for another train due to go to London. Actually, people were on the train and then the driver went sick. |
| 1:03.1 | So that was cancelled. So it's a pretty miserable state of affairs even at the best of times. |
| 1:10.0 | But let me see if I can get you through it. |
| 1:13.1 | So we know that the overtime ban by drivers on the, uh, belonging to the, um, as a left union, |
| 1:22.0 | which means the vast majority of them, working for 14 train operators across England with some services that are extended |
| 1:30.4 | into Wales and Scotland. They are going to be withdrawing their labour and the impact will have |
| 1:38.9 | will depend on the extent to which each train operator is dependent on overtime. And so a number of them, |
| 1:47.3 | very dependent on overtime. Also, staff sickness, much higher in winter than it is in summer. |
| 1:54.4 | And therefore, I'm expecting quite a lot of preemptive cancellations to be put in. |
| 1:59.6 | Already, Tenslick has been doing that. |
| 2:02.6 | Then you've got the rolling strikes, which are going to be something new, but the idea is to target a different part of the country every day, |
| 2:12.6 | so that drivers only lose one day's pay, but they can cause disruption for the maximum length of time. |
| 2:20.3 | Saturday the 2nd East Midlands Railway and LNERR. |
| 2:23.3 | Sunday the 3rd, Avanti West Coast, Chiltern, Great Northern Thames Lake, West Midlands |
| 2:28.3 | and the plan is particularly effective then because there's no diverting onto the East Coast mainline |
... |
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