"We Are Sorry For Any Inconvenience Caused"

The most mealy-mouthed, insincere apologies you will ever encounter are those that routinely accompany announcements made on public transport systems, tacked on the end of messages informing you that your train is formed by only four coaches instead of eight, delayed for some reason, or simply cancelled outright.

The number of times the average commuter hears that sort of apology is so great that quite quickly they are tuned out, thus it is only the more remarkable, ad hoc apologies that stick in the mind. One of my favourites has to be the apology from the driver of a train as it ground to a halt at Goodmayes Station en route to Liverpool Street, to the accompaniment of a loud bang. The delay in our service, and the cause of the bang, he told us was due to a pigeon landing on the overhead power cables...and exploding. Fortunately this did not cause sufficient delay for me to be late, although the pigeon was very late.

More frustrating than the disingenuous apologies, however are the complete lack of announcements - useful or otherwise - when things are not running properly. When I worked at Canary Wharf, the Jubilee Line station there would resound to frequent announcements stating the obvious, that "A good service is operating on the Jubilee Line" when the trains were running properly. There would be signs reinforcing the statements made on the public address, and cheerful Transport for London (TfL) staff would be (superfluously) manning the ticket barriers and generally milling about. On the day you arrived on the platform to find the indicator board blank, or one suggesting that the next train would not be for another twenty minutes instead of the usual three or four, announcements there would be none and TfL staff would be conspicuous by their absence, having probably barricaded themselves in their offices to avoid the wrath of the thousands of disgruntled commuters.

Station staff are not responsible for signal failures, broken down trains or people trespassing on the tracks, which are the sorts of reasons that services grind to a halt, so I cannot say that I blame the staff for going into hiding.  After all there is nothing worse than being subjected to abuse from unhappy would be passengers  when the problem is not of your making; and having worked in customer services I've experienced the shoe being on that particular foot; and if running away is not an option, then grinning and bearing it is the only recourse.

Less easy for rail travellers to sympathise with are the occasions when rail workers take industrial action. There are at present at least two industrial disputes on the railways, one on Eurostar and another on Southern railways. I don't pretend to know all of the ins and outs of either dispute, but on a very basic level the first appears to be about the detrimental effect on the work-life balance of train managers caused by what the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) call " the company’s failure to honour a 2008 agreement" on unsocial hours and duty rosters. If the union are to be believed, and the company have not honoured an agreement that presumably forms part of the employees' contracts then you have to have sympathy with their position.

Southern rail trains have been going nowhere recently.

The second dispute seems to stem from a desire by Southern rail's train operating company, Govia Thameslink Railway, to introduce driver only operation on their services, which the RMT oppose on health and safety grounds (not, apparently, as the cynic in me might have thought, in order to preserve jobs where one no longer exists). Concerns over health and safety are, like accusations of racism, hard to resist. Everyone, from management to unions to passengers must consider that health and safety are not areas anyone should be skimping on. Except that other rail networks run one man operated trains - and have done for many years - without any undue problems, and only yesterday (Wednesday, 10th August 2016), two-hundred passengers were evacuated without incident from a C2C train at Dagenham after a fire onboard caused by overheating brakes. C2C operate without guards; why they can do so without compromising health and safety but the RMT maintain that Southern rail cannot, I do not know.

Whatever the wrongs and rights of these disputes, one thing is for sure, the transport unions in general, and the RMT in particular, remain the most confrontational of Britain's trade unions. There is no doubt that trade unions are generally a good thing, going all the way back to the 1830's and the first real union, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU). But while it is generally believed that the withdrawal of labour should be the last resort, it all too often seems that the railway workers' unions are way too trigger happy when it comes to initiating strike action. And, as is so often the case, it is the general public that suffers the most when they do. Shop workers, cleaners, office workers, teachers, nurses; you name it, there is hardly an occupation unaffected by a rail strike.  However, while the travelling public may have little sympathy with the unions, then the rail companies don't get  much either, generally being held in fairly low esteem by commuters anyway. You might say that rail companies and the unions are a match made in heaven - or hell.

By and large the travelling public has become so accustomed  to the inconvenience that is caused to them by strikes that they simply ignore them and make alternative arrangements. Back in the late 1980's a series of weekly strikes by railway workers meant no trains and no tubes in London for six consecutive weeks. My employers, Midland Bank, ran coaches from all points of the compass to ferry staff to Central London. On week one they underestimated the number needed and my first wife June (who worked with me at Threadneedle Street) and I were left standing on the pavement (largely because June insisted we went to the back of the queue!)  In weeks two to five the bank ran sufficient coaches, but our working day was condensed between 11am and 3pm, although there were four hours stuck in traffic either side of that period. In week six our coach took us to North Woolwich where we were decanted onto a boat to sail to Tower Pier. Having got used to truncated hours on Wednesdays, we actually arrived at the office earlier than was most people's normal arrival time, much to the chagrin of many!

Under BR, Liverpool Street was dirty, smokey and dingy.

Nowadays, Liverpool Street is a much more pleasant place to be.

Some people may say that if it were not for the parlous state of the railways since they fell into private ownership, the unions would not have to act in the way they have. That if the railways were in public ownership and not in the control of companies interested primarily in the return to their shareholders, there would be peace and harmony between bosses and unions. Except, of course that during the days of the nationalised British Rail the railways were chronically underfunded, rolling stock was dated, uncomfortable and unreliable, stations were dirty, dingy and potentially dangerous, and industrial action was a regular occurrence; more regular than it is now, in fact.

At the Labour Party conference in 2015, nationalisation of the railways became official party policy and Jeremy Corbyn, speaking recently about the Southern rail dispute reaffirmed his party's commitment to nationalisation. European Union law, and in particular the First Railway Directive, make competition in the rail industry compulsory - under the directive, multiple train companies must be allowed to use the same track, making nationalisation difficult, if not impossible. Ironic, isn't it, given that they were ostensibly in the Remain camp during the EU referendum debate, that a central plank of Labour Party policy will become much easier to implement now that the UK has voted for Brexit.