Now misery of rail strikes starts to spread

TRAIN strikes are set to spread after a militant trade union announced coordinated action on three railways.

In England, long-suffering passengers on Southern Rail will now be joined in their misery by commuters using Arriva Rail North and Merseyrail in a walk-out on March 13.

It marks the 30th day of strike action by train guards on Southern.

The walks-outs are orchestrated by the RMT union over changes to the role of train guards. Rail bosses want to strip them of responsibility for opening and closing train doors and give this task to drivers, who can monitor platforms using CCTV.

The RMT claims this is dangerous, despite the system having been approved by regulators and used on trains across the UK for more than three decades.

RMT general secretary Mick Cash has been warning for some time that the strikes could spread.

Last month, Merseyrail signed a deal worth up to £700million with Swiss firm Stadler to build and maintain 52 driver-only trains for the Liverpool City region. It plans to introduce them by 2020 and says none of the permanent guards or guard managers would lose their jobs. Arriva has also investigated using driver-only trains.

The RMT said more than 81 per cent of members at Arriva and Merseyrail voted for strike action, with 93.5 per cent backing action short of a strike. Mr Cash said Arriva and Merseyrail bosses failed to guarantee that guards would be kept on trains and that Southern ‘snubbed’ an offer of talks.

A spokesman for Southern said: ‘We asked the RMT executive to suspend any further action when they met today so that talks could take place. Instead, they have chosen to put their members through even more pointless industrial action.’

Merseyrail said changes to train operations would result in around 60 ‘on-board customer service positions’ being created.