Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse – it just has!
With the RMT strike days being supplemented by strikes announced by ASLEF, Southern has now announced it will be unable to run any bus replacement services across the Southern network during ASLEF strike days.
The reason for this is that, during RMT strikes, many train services have run because 40% of services don’t have guards/ conductors/ on-board supervisors: additionally, Southern has been able to bring in “contingency” conductors. So that leaves a large but manageable number of services to be operated by replacement buses. However, with train drivers on strike, no trains are able to operate and so Southern say it is impossible to replace all their services by buses.
Meanwhile, with time running short before the first ASLEF strike day on Tuesday, there is the possibility (hope may be more accurate) that strikes may be cancelled so do check with http://www.southernrailway.com/your-journey/strike/aslef-strike/
[Editor’s note: We can understand that it might not be possible to replace every train service with a bus on ASLEF strike days, but to use this as an excuse for not even attempting to supply any bus services at all is surely a height of incompetence that even Southern have not reached before.]
Photo: library image
Civil disobedience is your only hope. The government pushed by Amber Rudd and her fellow Sussex MPs should have intervened months ago. They haven’t and they won’t.
On a day when the trains ARE running you need a minimum of 200 upstanding citizens to sit down on some chosen level-crossings (Rye and Hampden Park?) and refuse to move until the government gives an undertaking to hive SR off from Govia.
Protesters will eventually and with difficulty be carried off by the police but, given media coverage, Magistrates and judges will be reluctant to don the black cap if the quality and quantity of the protest are sufficient.
About fifty years ago when the Hastings to Ashford rail line was under threat of closure post-Beeching I took part in a not insignificant protest march through the town and rally on the Salts. Much was made of the absence of the then Rye MP, the late Bryant Godman Irvine, from the event. (At the time we thought he probably wasn’t capable of finding Rye on a map, but the town was rock-solid Tory at the time.)
I recently found the letter about the protest that was written by me and my flat mate in London, we were both at the Grammar School, and published on the front page of the Sussex Express and County Herald. We were especially chuffed at that!!
Our efforts were not in vain and the railway kept running, until the sorry events of 2016.
Well said John Howlett. I think the idea would have a lot of support.