ON FEBRUARY 23 2007, train 1S83, the 17:15 service from London Euston to Glasgow derailed near Grayrigg in Cumbria.

It was carrying four crew and 105 passengers and was travelling at 95mph when it came off the tracks. 

The derailment was caused by a faulty set of points. The coroner, Ian Smith, found that a scheduled inspection had not taken place and that Network Rail had been warned of concerns about the availability of the right tools and problems related to understaffing. 

He then issued a rule 43 report in order to raise concerns, with a view to preventing similar incidents in the future. 

Sixteen years on, Network Rail wants to cut safety inspections on the infrastructure by 50 per cent in order to facilitate mass redundancies. 

For those of us in train operating companies — alongside the worry of job losses in our own areas and the attacks on our terms and conditions — the cuts planned for Network Rail are of equal concern. 

When problems do occur, such as track circuit, points or signalling failure, we rely on the expertise of our colleagues in Network Rail to fix them so our passengers can continue their journey. 

We know that the safety inspections carried out by maintenance workers keep us, our families, friends and customers safe while travelling on the railway. 

The idea of cutting 2,500 maintenance jobs — meaning 670,000 fewer hours of maintenance work each year — is, frankly, terrifying. 

I asked my colleague, who works in maintenance side for Network Rail, what we should expect the consequences of these cuts to his grade to be. 

He said: “At first you wouldn’t see much change. Work would be reprioritised. But maintenance would become reactive rather than proactive. 

“Very soon staff would just be fixing failures rather than undertaking preventative maintenance. Eventually the minor issues that have been continually reprioritised become major faults and sooner or later something is missed that results in disaster.”

We have one of the safest railways in the world — thanks not only to the diligence, commitment and experience of the workers but because trade unions have fought for the high safety standards we have now. 

Unfortunately, our railway operates on some of the oldest infrastructure in the world due to decades of underfunding. It needs more investment, not less. 

Rail — being the lowest contributor to transport climate emissions — can play an important role in decarbonising transport. Instead, the government wants to strip £2 billion from the industry. 

There are, of course, other areas these savings could come from. Network Rail could save £115 million a year by bringing outsourced services back in-house, for example. 

Three private companies which own the rolling stock make average pre-tax profits of around £208m a year. The owning groups of train-operating companies made nearly £300m in profits during the pandemic.

While workers in some rail companies were being told their Sunday shifts were being taken away because there was “no money,” FirstGroup handed its shareholders £500m. 

Instead of this money leaking out of the railway in to private profit, we could reinvest it.

TSSA members from stations grades in Avanti West Coast are joining the RMT in taking strike action today, to fight for a pay rise, job security and for no changes to our terms and conditions without the agreement of our unions. 

Like all rail staff, we worked through the pandemic to keep vital rail services running. We now face unprecedented changes across our industry — with no guarantee of keeping our jobs or our terms and conditions. 

The Department for Transport’s industry proposals — shared with unions in June 2022 — outlined four major pieces of so-called “workplace reforms.” 

One of these is “Retailing Modernisation” which states: “Ticket offices at stations to be re-purposed and modernised, phased over a 3-18 months transitional period enabling all retailing to take place on-line, on apps, using self-service ticket machines or contactless ticketing.”

Anyone who spends any time at a busy station like Euston will see endless queues for ticket offices, even when there are ticket machines available. 

A freeze on recruitment in some companies has seen an incredible amount of pressure applied to our ticket office staff. Tourists, elderly customers, vulnerable and disabled people need our ticket offices to be staffed, but this need is being completely ignored by the government in its ambition to make cuts to staffing while boosting profits for privateer operators. 

While TSSA members across stations grades had hours cut, night shifts removed and entered into the third year of an imposed pay freeze, rail bosses have been raking in money while sitting in the comfort of their homes. 

The two highest-paid Network Rail directors took home around £1m between them in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. 

One of these was CEO Andrew Haines. In an interview with GB News, Haines said he was “leading from the front” by taking a 20 per cent cut during the pandemic. 

In reality — according to the Network Rail annual report and accounts for 2022 — this cut was a temporary one for only four months. His pay, including benefits, has now been increased to £593,000, up from £557,000. That £36,000 increase to his pay is higher than the annual salary of most rail workers. 

The money is there and always has been. This action is not only about the pay, terms and conditions of TSSA and RMT members in the rail industry but part of a much bigger picture. 

The economic situation we are living in now is not so much a “cost of living” crisis but a crisis of private profit that the ruling class expect the workers to bear the cost of. 

How much longer does the government expect the workers to accept the rich getting richer while we get poorer? 

Asking for a pay rise in line with RPI has been met with feigned surprise by those who benefit from our exploitation. 

It should be no surprise to them at all. More and more workers are recognising that the profits of these private companies are the workers’ unpaid wages and this injustice has existed for far too long. 

In 1915, James Connolly wrote about a strike of shopmen and other workers on the railways in Dublin in his piece The Railway Thief: “Through their Union they have put in a request that their wages be so advanced that they may maintain the same standard of life as heretofore. That modest request must be acceded to, and all the rest of the palaver may be dispensed with.”

Sarah-Jane McDonough, TSSA industrial rep.