Northern is recruiting drivers, 108 of them, and the wages on offer amount to the most stinging rebuke possible to the thick-headed militancy that has regularly brought trains to a halt for the past 20 months, and will again next week. After training, those drivers will earn £54,500 a year. This is in a county where the average annual wage is just over £30,000. With overtime, the drivers will easily double that regional average. Poor them. The heart bleeds.
It takes a very special sort of warped logic to press on with strikes that discourage people from using trains at the very point when the most fundamental challenge facing the railways is a fall in passenger numbers. Aslef may be stuck in the past, but the country and the railways are not. Changed working patterns as a result of the pandemic mean fewer people are using the trains.