Watch The Independent’s Travel correspondent, Simon Calder, deliver his verdict on the train strikes coming this winter and how they might affect you.

“I’m afraid it is going to be a miserable December for rail travelers,” Calder says.

“Effectively there’s an entire advent calendar starting with nine days of an overtime ban by the train drivers union ASLEF, a whole series of rolling strikes right across England. Then we get into the schedule cuts, and who could forget Christmas engineering which are gonna be particularly bad on Christmas Eve,” he explains.