The four out of 10 present employees who joined after that date get nothing.The company has told the union it will be spending £14m a day on maintaining and improving the fabric of the network over the next five years. Mr Crow says management has estimated it would take £12m to introduce similar travel benefits for all employees.”If you work on the Irish railways you get 75 per cent off rail fares in Britain but if you work on the British network you can get no such concession. Mr Crow, and his family, can expect to be pursued by packs of hacks. His motives will be suspected, his integrity challenged and any skeletons skulking in cupboards will be torn from their hiding places.Unless management produces a large rabbit from its corporate hat quickly, a dispute looks inevitable. Some of the issues at the heart of the argument are more easily addressed than others. A 3 per cent pay offer, which, the union argues, is the lowest offered in the industry, could doubtless be tweaked if management had a mind to.A more difficult issue is complementary travel. All those who joined the railway before privatisation in 1996 enjoy an unlimited 75 per cent discount on rail fares and 10 to 20 free trips a year, depending on seniority.

His support of Millwall football club will be alluded to – “motto: no one likes us we don’t care”- his former membership of the Communist Party will be savoured, and his respect for Arthur Scargill, the former miners’ leader adduced as evidence that he is potty.A dispute with Network Rail will do for the right-wing press what Andy Gilchrist, leader of the Fire Brigades Union did for them last year. If workers at the state-backed organisation vote yes – and Mr Crow confidently expects they will – it would be the first serious national industrial action suffered by passengers for nearly a decade.The burly, shaven-headed Mr Crow, an Eastender who shoots from the lip, will be the target of the “pop” papers. Our job is to defend and improve our members’ terms and conditions.”Unlike some other union leaders, the general secretary of the RMT union has not been house-trained by public relations consultants. What you see is what you get; and you could be getting a great deal of it over the coming months.This week, 7,000 employees at the infrastructure organisation Network Rail will begin voting in a ballot for strikes which would halt most trains, probably all of them. “People would say I was crying crocodile tears.
“Our job is to represent working people Management is refusing to negotiate We either accept that or do something about it. You cannot have a dispute without inconvenience to the travelling public It’s not selfish. Adwalkers are set to be part of everyday life and be seen at pop concerts, conferences and on the high street alongside traditional billboards.” We’ll see.

Shares in the company, the 500th to use the lightly regulated Ofex market, start trading today.. Do not expect hand-wringing apologies from Bob Crow when the expected strikes by his members bring the country’s rail network to a halt next month. “I’m not one of those union officials who continually say they regret the inconvenience caused by industrial action,” he says “People would say I was crying crocodile tears. Adwalkers wear ergonomically designed suits with 8-inch LCD screens displaying advertising, games, ticketing, ringtones and interactive messaging.

Brokers report that fundraising has become noticeably more difficult in the past month or so, and Oakdene will be rueing all the publicity given last week to the veteran fund manager Tony Dye’s prediction that London house prices are on the point of a 30 per cent collapse.Oakdene is focused heavily on the South-east, but reckons shortage of supply will keep house prices buoyant for a while yet. As well as its new building work, Oakdene will be talking up the easy profits to be made from refurbishing its portfolio of rundown investment properties along the south coast.Adwalker’s spin doctor phones from Piccadilly Circus to ask if we want them to take us a photo of their model in this fetching modern version of the end-of-the-pier sandwich board The adviser also suggests a caption “Adwalker provides a brand new form of advertising. IBM, Seagate and Maxtor, the world’s three largest makers of hard disks, are testing the little Sheffield company’s new Carolite material in disk drives because, Dyson claims, it allows disks to be spun that much quicker without increasing vibrations.The hope is that Dyson will have commercialised the technology by the end of the year and it could be contributing significantly to profits by 2006. A new broker has started to put out research on Dyson – Evolution Beeson Gregory has a “buy” recommendation – which ought to help liquidity in the stock, too.Oakdene HomesOakdene Homes, the Ofex-listed house builder, starts its roadshow in the City this week in an effort to raise £5m and move up to AIM with a £20m valuation.