National Railway Museum: The British Rail Union has today announced that it has been secretly balloting members for its first anti-strike.
An overwhemling majority of 98% of members have voted for the action which involves all railway staff members only doing the work to keep the railway moving. This will keep the passengers on the trains and services should run fine but the company will be hit financially.
How It Works:
All staff, regardless of if they are on holiday or days off will report for duty. Management structures means that those actually booked to work trains as drivers and guards will still allocate the work as normal. Guards and drivers not booked to work will select to work trains with the existing crews at random. Guards will patrol trains but not carry out ticket checks or carry ticket issuing equipment.
All gateline, revenue protection, security, administration, office, ticket office and train cleaning staff will report for duty at their designated location and then join the first appropriate train to assist guards in patrolling the train. No staff will issue or check tickets.
Because of the random nature of the action, trains may be manned by between 1 and 101 staff, signal boxes will have 4 times the number of staff trying to complete the work to route trains, controllers will have 4 times the number of people managing incidents and we believe this will lead to a punctual service for passengers, but a managerial headache. During this time no fares will be taken by staff, although managers may try to force passenger to use the automated machines.
The action will start at 0001, a week on Mondy and last until 2359 on Friday.
