Unions that refuse to negotiate or put reasonable offers to their members have something to hide.
When a reasonable offer actually turns up, do let us know.
Overall the number of staff employed by TfW Rail and Merseyrail are insignificant to the total number.
What about all of the staff employed by Network Rail? Staff who are in TSSA, ASLEF, Unite, or those who aren't in any union? They're all still getting paid whether there's any work to do when they turn up or not.
I don't know how rostering works
I'm certainly not going to contradict you there.
but given cancellation of strikes often means industrial action timetables are still in place, I would guess it means drivers are rostered based on the RMT action, with more having rest days to coincide and fewer uncovered driver shifts on other days.
No. Base rosters are constructed according to the LTP timetable. Even if you STP cancel the entire timetable and revert everyone to Spare, you can still only move shift start/end times by the agreed amounts (which might for example mean three hours either way).
In most operators obliging someone to change their Rest days would not happen - fixed or rolling rest day patterns are what allow you to plan your family life and these are the very changes to conditions being fought against in this dispute. In those operators where "Spare weeks" exist, rest days can be moved, but generally this means picking up a full rostered line of work from whoever's turn it is to have their week's block leave.
Of course you could argue that staff need not be able to plan their family lives, they could just be told what shifts they're working with three days notice, including not being told even whether they'll be on earlies, lates, nights - or even not in at all. Why give them a family life, they're only frontline staff, right? Well I've worked in all manner of employers, most of them paying minimum wage and I've pretty much always had either a fixed rest day or a rolling pattern. David Cameron used to insist that he wasn't disturbed in the evenings while he was putting his children to bed, is it so much to ask to at least know which evenings I'll be home for, even if I have to work the other ones?
And the reduction in fuel and marginal maintenance/wear and tear on equipment of all types.
Peanuts. Leases still get paid, outsourced supply/maintain contracts still get paid, Mother Nature still batters the infrastructure, buildings still get lit and heated, staff not in that particular strike (which as I've pointed out above is most of them) still get paid...
Large parts of the railway are such economic basket cases that just binning it off will save money compared to trying to operate them on the existing basis.
You could say that about almost any public service. Thankfully though we don't live in America where short-term profit is the only objective and the wider benefits of an educated/healthy population - not to mention functioning public transport - are ignored.
and following on from that, "you don't have to work on the railways,, if the hours and conditions are this bad" its your choice, no body is forcing you to put up with these conditions...
Personally when I get on a train I want the driver to be well-rested and happy in his work. My life is in his hands.
Aren't we running fewer trains now?
If we were, wouldn't that have saved costs already? In any case, where I am apart from a couple of peak extras we went back to the 2019 timetable ages ago. One route is two-hourly vice hourly pending fleet renewal and there are a few other trains missing from a twn minute shuttle, but none of these are on the same routes as the overcrowding we're seeing. We're actually running longer formations in many places, four coach formations have replaced two/three coaches.
The point is that they need to be run more efficiently with less waste
I completely agree. How much has ministerial dithering wasted? Not just on the strikes, but the money spent on the GWML electrification west of Thingley Junction that Grayling pulled the plug on. How much steelwork is lying around some airfield? How much did Agility screw out of GWR (i.e. the taxpayer) for fitting diesel engines under the 801s and remodelling depots? How much did Agility get out of the DfT for the IEP contract compared with the much better deals that the TOCs negotiated for the 802s? How much did it cost to equip the 365 fleet with ETCS shortly before they were dumped at Crewe, never to carry a passenger again? How much did the Mk5 sets for TPE cost, ordered because the DfT had a hare-brained scheme for the reuse of the 442s with locos and now facing an uncertain future? How much did refurbishing the 442s cost? You may well say that it was the ROSCO who paid, but they'll get their money back from the railway somehow.
The railway is littered with examples of wasted money, but it's not frontline staff who are responsible, most of it is the DfT.
That's a very bitter approach, not sure if it because you aspire to be a manager and they haven't accepted you. Or you are narked that they negotiated bigger bonuses than RMT negotiated for your grade.
"Negotiated bonuses"? No, these are the bribes that the clerical staff have been offered in order to volunteer to work extra duties (I had another word in mind there, but decided that too many people would lose their minds). Just another example of how much money the government is wasting fighting this dispute. I imagine that if you offered the real staff £500 per day (somewhere in the region of triple time) you'd never have a strike again.
Not settling costs £1.4bn a year for the duration of the strike - which will end at some point. After that the cost is £0.
Not really, the dispute would just rumble on into subsequent years.
expect (hmmm) that there is a plan to enhance and fast-track recruitment and training to address that....
Shortening training time always went so well in the past.
There will clearly be carnage for a period.
I trust that you don't mean that in the literal sense.
In terms of disruption caused it would take decades to restore a full service. It took a decade to recover the full ATC service in the US, and Reagan had the advantage of having ready-trained Air Traffic Controllers in the military. Pretty sure that you won't find any train drivers in the army, defence cuts have seen to the railway squadrons of the RLC and Royal Engineers.
