Workers at four rail companies are to stage two 24-hour strikes in worsening disputes over the role of guards and driver-only trains.
Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union at Southern, Merseyrail, Arriva Rail North and Greater Anglia will walk out on October 3 and 5.
It comes the day after the union Aslef announced drivers on the London Underground will walk out for 24 hours on October 5.
Rail workers on four networks, Southern, Merseyrail, Arriva Rail North and Greater Anglia, are to hold two days of strikes next month
The strikes will coincide with the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester.
The Merseyrail strike will also coincide with the first phase of work to transform Liverpool Lime Street mainline station by the end of 2018.
The Southern dispute started 18 months ago and the RMT has taken over 30 days of strike action, causing misery for the company’s 300,000 passengers.
The RMT claims the move to driver-only trains – leaving drivers to open and close the train doors rather than guards – is dangerous. It is supported by drivers’ union Aslef.
It wants rail operators to guarantee that every train will have a guard.
But the safety warning has been rejected by independent rail safety watchdogs, with driver-only trains operating across the UK for decades.
This was the scene in London’s Waterloo station when Southern held a strike in January
Jan Chaudhry-van der Velde, Merseyrail’s managing director, said: ‘We are busy trying to build a better city region with an improved railway.
‘The RMT seem to be doing everything in their power to destroy this work. Don’t they want Liverpool to succeed?’
Mick Cash, RMT general secretary, said the union wanted to resolve all the disputes with talks including the Department for Transport.
He said Southern Rail and the DFT had rejected ’round-table discussions’, that Greater Anglia had ‘failed to guarantee on the future role of guards’ an accused Arriva Rail North of ‘intransigence’.