OREANDA-NEWS. "Our employees have received pay rises eight times higher than other public sector workers over the last four years and have now been offered a deal for the next four years that is unmatched elsewhere.

“Despite the very clear need to modernise our railways, we have offered a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies for the next two years. The unions have also rejected a number of proposals that would boost productivity, removing our ability to offer them more. 

“We will do everything we can to keep our railways moving during these times of uncertainty and to stop the RMT from behaving in a way that will cause untold misery to our passengers and will hurt the economy. Fewer than half of RMT members at Network Rail have voted in favour of strike action and we urge union leaders to come back to the table for further discussions.”

Network Rail owns, manages and develops Britain’s railway – the 20,000 miles of track, 40,000 bridges and viaducts, and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations (the largest of which we also run). In partnership with train operators we help people take more than 1.6bn journeys by rail every year - double the number of 1996 - and move hundreds of millions of tonnes of freight, saving almost 8m lorry journeys. We’re investing ?38bn in the railway by 2019 to deliver more frequent, more reliable, safer services and brighter and better stations.