The glorious Scottish summer
FFS! Rain, rain and more bloody rain!
I wouldn't normally link to The Scotsman, but I saw this on the RailScot web-site and thought it was of particular interest. I was a train driver from 1993 to 2003, and during that time the railway was privatised and Scottish operations were franchised to National Express, a bus operator. Following their takeover, they paid off a number of older drivers, and refused for the first five years or so of their contract to take any new drivers on. Meanwhile, while ScotRail drivers were still on a salary of approximately £16,000, other franchises such as Virgin and GNER were paying their drivers £25,000 or more for far less stressful work, and every ScotRail driver who could get away left for those other companies. ScotRail attempted to cover their work by pressurising their drivers to work every available rest-day and hour of overtime, but train cancellations became more and more frequent; these were always blamed on "unexpected levels of staff sickness", or any made-up reason apart from the genuine one. Eventually, National Express blackmailed the Scottish Government into renegotiating their contract and paying them a huge additional sum of money to take on a batch of new drivers, by threatening to throw in the towel and bail out of the contract. Now it appears that the latest franchise-holders, Abellio, are playing exactly the same game. This is just one example of what an absolute fiasco privatisation is. As if it wasn't bad enough that private corporations are creaming off profits from publicly-funded services, they have the power to screw even more money out of the public purse by refusing to provide the service they are contracted to provide.