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

It's Wednesday the 20th of September and my excellent colleague, Ben Parker, asked me yesterday,

do you think we will get any more rail strikes called in the next day or two? And I said,

absolutely no way, Ben. And my thought was that, well, they can't possibly call any more

strikes because the RMT union is tied up today, giving evidence about closures of the ticket offices.

And secondly, they like to give minimum notice of strikes.

And so therefore, they will not want to call a national rail strike on a Wednesday because

they just don't do that.

So no, nothing will be coming from the

RMT Union. So I was a little surprised in the afternoon, suddenly to find that the

RMT Union has announced tube strikes on the London Underground on the 4th and the 6th of

October. This is Wednesday and Friday. And this is a dispute completely

unrelated to the rail strikes. This one is about job losses and what the union says are safety

concerns, as opposed to the wider national rail strikes involving both the RMT Union and ASLF, the train drivers,

which is all about pay and working arrangements.

However, it is no coincidence that they have called a strike on the 4th of October,

which is one of the next dates in the latest round of national rail strikes by

train drivers. And the aim is to make things really disrupted on that particular Wednesday.

It also happens to be the last day of the Conservative Party conference. The reason for it is that the RMT says it's been locked in a long-running dispute,

over 600 staff cuts at stations and detrimental working conditions since last year.

And they say they have fewer staff facing higher

workloads more alone working and increased fatigue and therefore they're going to shut down the

...