Although it's also part of what the various transport unions are griping about - plenty of railway staff have been so since the BR days in the 70s and 80s - the

Although it's also part of what the various transport unions are griping about - plenty of railway staff have been so since the BR days in the 70s and 80s - they come from an era when the railway was a Safe Job for Life - and for anyone older the shadow of the Beeching axe hangs eternally over them. Rail operators have been making noises about automation for decades - see DLR - and as a result staff and unions are feeling (correctly) threatened, which is generating the dysfunctional working relationship between operators and unions. The recent Sothern action has been over automation driven redundancies. I agree that rail strikes are heinously disruptive, but it's a symptom of the elephant in the room, and we can either choose to treat it as an experiment in orderly and fair transition from human to automated labour, or use it as a reason to ban all industrial action, which appears to be where the government is going. I worry that if we end up with this chaos from the mismanagement of labour transition in one industry we are in for a very rough time when automation starts genuinely threatening much broader categories. So you're right in the long term, but getting there is hard - you can't just sweep humans under the carpet; it gets unbearably lumpy if you do.