Advent calendar of rail strikes set to shred service as deal is severely delayed

Eighteen months after action was announced, there is daylight for the RMT; but Aslef and the bosses still aren’t talking

Another week of rail misery beckons for British passengers from Friday, with that all-too-familiar disruption to services around the country: the latest wave in a national pay dispute in which the first strikes were announced 18 months ago.

A nine-day overtime ban announced by Aslef for train drivers will shred timetables, while a concurrent series of rolling 24-hour strikes will halt all trains at different operators daily as December arrives.