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

It's Friday the 29th of September, which means that we are on the point of another rail strike.

That, of course, is the problem that has afflicted train passengers for the last 15 months or so.

It's also today the start of a new round of overtime ban.

So let me just run through what the problems are.

This is all involving, as left, the train driver's union.

So they are very unhappy about their hopes of getting a decent pay deal without strings attached. They say the government wants to

give them a 20% pay cut and take away all their hard-won terms and conditions.

The government says this is nonsense and they are offering a pretty decent increase from

60,000 a year to 65,000 a year on average, and that's for a four-day week.

Passenger, of course, stuck in the middle.

So today we've got an overtime ban, which will mean that there are going to be cancellations

of some trains.

It's going to be much worse on Saturday, the 30th of September, and Wednesday the 4th of

October, when there are strikes that are being called because of the Conservative Party conference.

The General Secretary of Aslef, McWeelellan told me that he is targeting deliberately that

normally you would get thousands of delegates and media hangers on travelling, particularly from London to Manchester for that conference.

It will knock out the vast majority of train services across England, Transport for Wales

and ScotRail not affected and other people such as Mersey Rowell are not hit either.

But the assumption has to be if you're using one of the main intercity

or commuter networks that there will be no trains or few trains. So let's just have a quick

spin around. I'll tell you the trains which are running. Southern has a kind of half-hourly

...