Holiday chaos warning as rail union ballots for first national strike train for 14 years

A militant union is threatening to bring train services to a standstill over the half-term holidays in the first national rail strike for 14 years.

The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers is to ballot 17,000 maintenance and signalling staff for industrial action over two disputes with employer Network Rail.

The union – the rail industry's biggest – said the results of the two votes will be known by May 22 and strikes could start a week later, paralysing the railways as most schools begin their half-term break.

The last national strike by signal workers was in 1994 when rail services were disrupted for three months.

The consumer group Passenger Focus said the misery was "avoidable" and urged both sides to resolve the two disputes.

In the first row, the RMT is balloting more than 12,000 maintenance workers after they rejected an "unacceptable" offer from Network Rail after months of talks on harmonising terms and conditions for workers, many of whom transferred to the company from other firms.

Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, said: "The company has been using the talks to drive down our members' conditions and they can hardly be surprised that their pathetic offer was thrown out by a margin of more than 100 to one."

He said the company was trying to sneak inferior conditions "in through the back door as it sought to cut its maintenance budget by up to 12 per cent year on year.

In a second dispute, 5,000 signal workers and other operational staff will vote on whether to strike over pay and conditions after rejecting the latest offer.

The RMT said the two-year pay deal had improved on the previous offer by just 0.1 per cent more in the first year.

But Network Rail's director of human resources, Peter Bennett, said the firm had made a "fair and reasonable" offer, worth 4.8 per cent this year and 0.5 per cent above the rate of inflation next year.

Mr Bennett said: "People in any walk of life would recognise this as a good deal and one that other unions have already accepted as fair. But the RMT want even more. Their demands are unreasonable."

Network Rail said it was also in the middle of talks with unions about standardising more than 50 sets of terms and conditions for maintenance workers which the firm inherited several years ago when it brought repair work back in-house.

Mr Bennett said: "We would ask all our employees to carefully consider the issues on the table.

"On the one hand we have a very fair offer that compares very favourably with wage settlements across the country and on the other there is nothing across the table on which to protest or strike about.

"We would ask employees to use their vote to turn away from damaging industrial action."