Before midsummer dawn on the first day of the biggest rail strike in Britain for three decades, a small crowd of airline passengers gathered at Blackfriars station in central London.
They had planned to catch the 3.40am departure to Gatwick airport – one of very few trains scheduled to be running in the early hours of 21 June. The instruction by the RMT union is not to start work after midnight, but to continue shifts that have begun. So the night shift of signallers and other staff were on duty until the end of their working day.
