Hello and welcome to the Independent Daily Travel Podcast with me, Simon Calder, speaking to you from a fairly busy area around London Waterloo, Britain's busiest rail station. Oh my goodness.

Anyway, as the siren fades away, let me tell you that it is world car free day.

Yes, the day that all sorts of environmental groups get together to try to persuade us to walk, to cycle, and to use public transport.

So what better day for announcing that you are going to shut down the rail network. Yes, that's what's happened in the

past hour or so. The RMT union has said it is calling another national rail strike. This

involves people working for network rail, crucially, particularly the signalers and staff

working for 15 other train operators.

The vast majority of those staff have voted strongly in favour of industrial action in a dispute

that is over pay, it's over jobs and it's over productivity, working conditions. The RMT union says that this is

entirely down to the fact that there has not been any new pay offer. You'll recall that this has been

dragging on for over three months now. There were supposed to be strikes last week. They were called off as a mark

of respect to her majesty after the sad death of the Queen, but hostilities are resuming.

Let me tell you what it's going to mean. So there is a national rail strike on the 1st October.

We already knew that. It's going to be not just the RMT going

on strike, but also as left, the train drivers union whose staff work for 12 train operators. They

will be striking. That will probably have the biggest effect that we've seen in any of the

rail strikes so far this year.

It will most certainly tip into Sunday the 2nd of October.

There will be a knock-on effect.

Then, Monday and Tuesday things should work fairly normally.

On Wednesday the 5th, there is going to be a strike by those train drivers working for the dozen train operators and belonging to the Asliff Union.

We don't know quite what's going to happen there.

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