Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder, coming to you

actually from World Travel Market, London, the great annual get-together of the world's travel industry.

I'm not, though, talking about that today. I will be tomorrow, but today I need to talk about trains because

there's an awful lot of upset and confusion about what is happening to the railways.

So, late on Friday afternoon, the RMT union called off the strike which was planned for Saturday, for Monday today and for Wednesday.

Now, you would be forgiven for thinking, oh, well, that's great. So all the trains ran normally.

Far from it. We will not get back to normal running of the trains until Thursday and by the way, that's also the day of a strike on the London Underground and the London Overground.

So let me talk through what is happening and why and what it means for the future.

So the rail union, the RMT, the main rail union, had called out

its staff working for network rail and for 14 train operators. Now, by far the biggest impact

is from the signalers working for network rail. And so as is now standard with national rail strikes, effectively half the

rail network gets shut down completely. On the other half, there is a skeleton service

operation between half past seven in the evening, three, half past seven in the morning and half

past six in the evening. And that has been the pattern for, well, the previous

eight days of strikes. And we've kind of got used to that. We've got trains from Brighton,

from Southampton, from Bristol, from Cardiff, from Manchester, from Liverpool, from Sheffield,

and so on, running basically once an hour, maybe during those hours to and from London.

Very early start to the last services, so you might find that by mid-afternoon, if you haven't got on a train, you're not going to complete your journey.

Now, when you lift the threat

of strike action, everybody returns to their jobs. So I met, for instance, a guard on a

southwestern railway enjoying a coffee at London Waterloo and he was spare. He didn't have a train to work on and that was hardly

surprising because they only ran one train in five on Saturday. The key thing is you've got to

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