Rail strike: West Midlands passengers warned of week of disruption

No services will call at Worcester Foregate Street during the strikes

Rail passengers in the West Midlands are being urged to only travel by train if they have no other choice.

The advice, which covers the period up to Sunday, comes amid the biggest rail strike in 30 years.

Thousands of workers are due to walk out on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in a dispute over pay and redundancies.

Only about a fifth of normal services are expected to be running in the region but some local areas are set to have none.

There will be no service on many routes out of Birmingham on strike days, with Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire facing the prospect of no trains at all.

"We do encourage customers only to travel if absolutely essential," said Eleni Jordan from Chiltern Railways.

The RMT union said "massive cuts" from the rail network meant thousands of job losses, reduced pensions and some staff being forced to accept salary cuts.

General Secretary Mick Lynch blamed the "dead hand" of government for members' strike action after negotiations failed between the parties.

While workers are only striking for three days, service operators said trains on days either side of the industrial action would be limited.

Most operators able to offer services on strike days will only run them between 07:30 and 18:30 BST.

Stephen Ireland, from Network Rail, said passengers who had to travel by train should expect services to take longer

Avanti West Coast said it would run one train an hour from Euston to Birmingham and beyond, with no services to Shrewsbury.

There will also be one train each hour running from Wolverhampton to Birmingham and between Birmingham New Street and Birmingham International, West Midlands Railway (WMR) said.

On the Cross-City Line, which runs from Lichfield Trent Valley in Staffordshire to Redditch in Worcestershire via Birmingham New Street, there will be two trains an hour.

No trains will run on any other WMR route, including those via Birmingham Snow Hill, plus Birmingham to Shrewsbury, Birmingham to Worcester and Hereford, and Nuneaton to Leamington Spa.

Transport for Wales, which serves Shrewsbury and Birmingham, also plans to suspend trains to the region.

CrossCountry said it planned to have one service each hour on its routes through Birmingham.

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No trains will run in either direction between Banbury and Birmingham from Tuesday to Saturday, Chiltern Railways said.

London Northwestern said on strike days it would only have one train an hour between Birmingham and Northampton as well as Birmingham to Crewe - with none between Birmingham and Liverpool.

Stephen Ireland, director of stations for Network Rail, said passengers would start to see reduced services from Monday evening as they prepared for Tuesday's first strike.

"I recommend [giving] yourself lots of time to travel for your service, they may [take] a bit longer, [and be] a lot more infrequent than previously," he warned passengers.