Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

Under the Arches, just south of Victoria Station in central London, makes a change.

And of course there's a railway dimension as so often there is because last night the RMT union called three more days of national strikes.

Let me explain when they are. It's November the 3rd, that's a Thursday, the 5th, a Saturday and the 7th,

that's a Monday. Now, these are solely members of the RMT who work for network rail.

They run the infrastructure, in particular, the signalling system.

And that's the crucial aspect of this, because if the signalers walk out, then as we've seen

on the eight previous RMT strikes so so far this summer you get a much

reduced rail network about half of the network closes completely the other half has perhaps

one in five of the previous trains and so therefore it shuts down a heck of a lot of potential journeys

and also it just doesn't affect the third the fifth and the seventh it also affects the fourth

the sixth and the eighth early morning at least because lots of signalers aren't in position

at the start of the working day.

It's the last thing of course that any traveller needs and the origin of this is really quite odd.

So last night when the RMT union announced the strike, they also explained what it was about.

Now, unbeknownst to all of us, it seems as though network rail and the RMT union have been getting to a good sort of accommodation.

And to the point where the RMT was going to put the whole thing to a ballot of their members,

at which point, well, hopefully the dispute would have been over,

because once a union does that, although there's no absolute guarantee that they're going to be taking,

that the members will accept it.

If your general secretary and his leadership team say,

we think this is a great deal,

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