The RMT Rail Strike

Exactly that :023:

No trains up here AT ALL, :rage: we are totally cut off. Nothing further north than the Central Belt, over 200 miles south. Lots of folk here travel by train down to work in Inverness daily and return in the evening. Lots of very angry people.

I bet they are Rox.

This won’t be forgotten

@PixieKnuckles , Sorry, l must disagree about skill levels Pixie !
Apart from what Bread explained, a pilot works in three dimensions and
has to cope with weather conditions and has to use judgement to land
and take off, whereas a train driver only has to stop and start the train ,
the rails control where it goes ?? The signals are even automated now and
will stop the train in an emergency !!
The two jobs cannot be compared !!
Donkeyman!

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Fair enough @Donkeyman you are allowed to disagree! :smiley: I just know whats involved, because I travelled on 4 different trains a day for 2 1/2 years when I worked in retail, so I got to know a lot of staff through chatting with them. I don’t know anything about planes.

There’s so much more to it than that.

Maybe surprisingly I support the strikers. It’s not the highly paid drivers who have taken action, it’s the much lower paid workers. The MP’s having voted themselves £2,212 pay rise recently really has put the cat amongst the pigeons. In fact its pretty obvious that the only way to get The Fat Oaf and the Front Bench cabal out of Downing Street is by industrial action across the board.

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@Rox , The SNP will cure all that ROX !! LOL!
Donkeyman! :+1::grin::grin::+1:

Maybe I misunderstood the bits of news I’ve seen - I’m not UK right now - but I understood the train drivers, who are higher paid, are striking too, through their Union ASLEF - their strike dates are different to the RMT strike dates.

The impression I get is that it is the RMT who are striking, going by all the pictures I have seen, waving their RMT banners.
Yet I am assured that the drivers’ union is ASLEF.

Then the drivers, on average, are paid a very generous amount pretty much equating to airline pilots, yet they sit all day on their backsides with their hand on a lever and doing nothing much else. Unlike airline pilots, they don’t have to worry about the many decisions they have to make when taking off and certainly when landing. They just follow the signals and signs as they approach them. I see little comparison between train drivers and airline pilots.

So if the strikers are mainly (or totally) RMT workers, why are the train drivers refusing to work?
Presumably in order to support their colleagues in the RMT.
More to the point, are the train drivers (who are the most highly paid) also demanding a large pay rise?

Those discussing the relative complexities of airline pilot job and train driver job may be interested in this account of when they tried out each other’s simulators.

https://www.virginatlantic.com/gb/en/blog/OurPeople/787-pilot-and-train-driver.html

In addition to airline pilot’s role being more complex, I think their personal investment is greater to gain the education, qualifications and training they need, often at their own expense if they do not train through a military route.

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I’m not dismissing the level of training a pilot has to go through. I just know that being a train driver is more than

Yes, I understand that and I’m sure a train driver’s role is more than just sitting on their backside - which is why I posted the article with details of the simulator experiences and comments straight from the horses’ mouths, of the similarities and differences.

Yes, I’ve just seen that ASLEF are taking strike action too - and I don’t blame them.

So apart from sitting on their backside with a hand on a lever and looking out of the window for signs and signals, what exactly do they do?

@PixieKnuckles " there’s much more to it that"
Explain please pixie ??
Donkeyman! :thinking::thinking:

Well to start with they have to learn the routes they run on so as to be aware of potential hazards on the route and where signals are to be expected and more.

But at least they don’t have to remember which turn to make! :rofl:

Turns out Alex Gordon, the RMT President, voted in this year is a marxist and CPB member who is a Putin apologist and anti Ukraine demonstrator.

Sack the lot of them and automate the trains.

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Scrap HS2 while we are at it.

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