Passengers facing huge delays amid the largest rail strike in 33 years have expressed their sympathy for the "struggling" workers who have been forced to walk out in protest.
More than 50,000 rail workers abandoned their stations as negotiations between unions and rail bosses collapsed on Monday.
Instead thousands joined picket lines to protest what the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) has called an "aggressive agenda" to freeze pay, cut jobs, pensions, and safe conditions for its members.
As a result just 20 per cent of normal rail services are running between drastically shorter hours on three days of planned strikes, today (June 21), Thursday and Saturday.
But Brits who arrived at deserted stations, as they battled to commute to work or travel to meet loved ones, told the Mirror they sympathised with the workers saying the strikes are "justified".
Robert, a retired electrical engineer of Hadston, Northumberland, was waiting at Newcastle station to travel to Newark with his wife Pauline.
He said: "We are both Tory voters but they are starting to fall apart. Under Cameron we had Austerity and then Theresa May said it had ended.
"But now we have people who are on the same wages as 9/10 years ago.
"The strike action is justified but it always comes down to the same thing - the Government wants to keep pay rises to about two percent while working people want rises to go up with inflation.
"If you do that, you have barristers, NHS workers all wanting the same thing and with inflation running at 11 percent, you cannot do that.
"It is a vicious circle."
The Government, which owns Network Rail has resisted calls to join the negotiations as Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the strike action.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps called the request for the Government to get involved "a stunt" as he denied RMT's claims that the Tories had been actively preventing employers and the union from reaching a settlement.
But rail workers and passengers alike slammed the Government as they exposed their fears for 'everyday families' struggling to make ends meet after a three year pay freeze and a cost of living crisis.
One train guard, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was scared for his friends and colleagues who are struggling to pay their bills.
The RMT member who has worked at Liverpool Lime Street station for 20 years said: “The government are saying the average pay is £43,000 but they’re taking into account the train drivers who are on over £50,000 and they’re not in this dispute, I don’t see any of them here.
"I’m not on anywhere near £43,000 I’m on £29,000 and I’m not complaining about that, I think it’s a fine pay for an honest day's work but I’m not here for me, I’m here for all my vulnerable colleagues on minimum wage, the cleaners, the catering staff and so on.
"I look at the picket line here and I see people who are struggling. I’m not struggling but I don’t want to start struggling either.
"The Government say they’re not involved but they also say they set the agenda, if they set the agenda they need to sit down at the table and negotiate with us, if they don’t want to they need to let us get on with it and sort it out between ourselves.
"We are not playing with Tonka toys, this is a critical safety environment that we work in and it needs to be treated with respect.
"Boris Johnson says he’s 'levelling up' but I don’t see him doing that, he’s looking at industries where you get a fair pay for an honest day's work and bringing it down.
"That’s not levelling up it’s a race to the bottom.”
Another RMT member told the Mirror that working for train crews serving food and hot drinks paid around £18,000-a-year before overtime.
Train guard David King, 40, a father-of-two from Newcastle, and a member of the RMT executive committee, stressed that the strike action was a "last resort" after protracted negotiations.
He explained that he had not received an increase on his £30,000-a-year salary for almost three years, while working throughout the pandemic.
"All we want is a fair pay rise," he said.
"We cannot keep up with the cost of living on our current salaries, you have to remember that many RMT members are earning £18-£30,000-a-year, not the telephone number salaries many of the managers are on.
"They have had big pay rises but staff on the frontline who worked during the pandemic and had to put up with all kinds of abuse are threatened with compulsory redundancies and changes to their pay and pensions."
The mass walk out has seen widespread travel chaos with monstrous motorway traffic jams, huge queues for rail replacement buses and passengers forced to take longer and clunky routes to their destinations.
The last industrial strike action on this scale held in Britain was back in 1989.
Sean Hayes, 38, a retail manager from Liverpool, Merseyside, had to arrive two hours earlier to get a train which would take twice as long as normal to get him to work in Manchester.
But despite admitting he was losing two hours of paid work during every day of strike action this week, he defended striking workers who aren't "spitting their dummy out with no cause".
He said: "Any strike like this is all to do with fair working conditions, this isn't a snap decision.
“It's not a case of people spitting their dummy out and affecting a large percentage of the community with no cause.
“This goes back decades to the state of the rail network, there’s a cost of living crisis now and people are trying to increase their take home pay.
“This is something that has been boiling over for 30 years.”
Meanwhile in London, tube passengers were forced to book hotels to make sure they could get to appointments on time.
Nicole, 37, and her 33-year-old partner Steven were waiting to take the Elizabeth Line - which is seeing a reduced service - then planned to order an Uber the rest of the way home.
She said: "We booked our appointment at the embassy three months beforehand and you can't really rebook these things. Lots of people are suffering for it.
"Our original plan was to get the train from Greenwich at 8am, but because of the tube strikes we didn't want to risk it, so we booked a hotel around Pimlico. It was a half hour walk from there, but we're now down £80 for hotel fees.
"It's just been stressful all around."
Another couple who landed in the capital after flying from Atlanta, USA, said they were caught out by the national strike action.
Sharon Wallace, 53, is planning to visit Wales with her pilot husband Wes to trace his ancestry.
She said: "We were really surprised because we had all our routes figured out only to discover the trains were on strike.
"It's not easy to navigate when you're not very familiar with everything, although everyone has been really helpful. There are lots of customer service staff standing and helping who are very knowledgeable.
"We leave on Saturday so will be trying to figure out a new route to get back to the airport."
Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed that the strikes could wreak havoc for schoolchildren who may need to travel to sit GCSE and A-Level exams, while festivalgoers faced a headache getting to Glastonbury for its 50th anniversary.
But Oluwarotimi Ajayi, a rail worker and RMT national executive member, said the disruption was justified as he took two buses to join the picket line at Paddington station in London.
He told the Mirror: “The government is trying to attack our jobs, our pay and our conditions.
"They’ve made it absolutely clear that our bosses are not meant to have any decision regarding pay.
"It’s just not right that for all the good work we’ve done during the pandemic we get a slap in the face.
“The dates of school exams weren’t known when the decision was made. It’s just for us to get our message across to the government and let them understand we won’t take any form of threat to job, pay and conditions.
"We also don’t want compulsory redundancy.
“The strikes are in the nation’s best interest - everyone deserves a pay rise with the cost of living crisis. National insurance has gone up, this affects everybody - not just us.
"This is why the RMT is fighting for the nation. A win for RMT is a win for the nation and we need to come together and win this fight against the government.
“The nation was out there surviving when they were all out there drinking booze and we don’t deserve that. We want better for ourselves and our colleagues.”
