Almost all the railway men and women I meet are decent, hard-working professionals who are devoted to helping the public travel safely and reliably.
Yet intermittently through the month of August they will be devoted to disrupting the journeys of passengers as much as possible. Train drivers belonging to the Aslef union and working for nine train operators will stop work on Saturday 13 August; other railway workers belonging to the RMT union are striking on Thursday 18 and Saturday 20 August, leading to four out of five trains nationwide being cancelled.