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Across Britain tomorrow morning, rail workers will be handing postcards to commuters warning of the dangers facing the rail industry if Con-Dem and SNP ministers get their way.

Higher fares, fewer staff, fewer services and lower safety standards add up to a bleak future for train travel - but these will be the stark reality if the recent McNulty report forms the basis of a government "command paper" expected to be published shortly.

In Scotland there is the added threat of proposals by the SNP government that would split up Scotrail and hand more power and profit to business interests.

It would be no exaggeration to say that our railways face the biggest threat since the dark days of Beeching's axe more than half a century ago.

Wealthy businessman Sir Roy McNulty - his CV includes stints running the Civil Aviation Authority and Shorts - was asked by the previous Labour government to study the costs of Britain's rail network.

The one thing McNulty wasn't asked to look at was the damaging and costly effect of privatisation, imposed by the last Tory government in the mid-1990s.

So although, quite rightly, McNulty found that Britain's railways were more fragmented and expensive to run than their still publicly owned European neighbours, he wasn't able - even if he had been willing - to explore the obvious benefits of restoring the industry to public ownership.

Never mind that the private sector has leeched a staggering ^11 billion from the railways since privatisation.

Never mind that the dangers created by a privatised, fragmented railway have been at the heart of disasters at Hatfield, Potters Bar, Tebay and Grayrigg.

And never mind that investment in the privatised railway is now three or four times more expensive than in the last days of publicly owned British Rail.

Instead, McNulty's blinkered report recommends more fragmentation, imposition of driver-only operation and the removal of safety-trained guards from all trains, higher fares, massive cuts in station staffing, wholesale closure of ticket offices, dangerous fragmentation of Network Rail and a watering down of maintenance standards.

Added together this will deliver the opposite of what is needed - it will mean a more fragmented, more expensive railway with fewer services, more private-sector exploitation and more risk.

Of course in business-speak "efficient" is a euphemism for "cheap," and staff are seen as costs rather than assets.

Hardly surprising then that more than a third of McNulty's efficiency savings would come from cutting staff and the pay of those who would remain after the carnage.

Yet the one element of the railway industry that has become more efficient is its staff.

McNulty zeroes in on the cost of rail staff - but omits to mention that productivity has outstripped pay increases, meaning that the men and women who get out there every day and run the railway have actually delivered more for less.

McNulty even removed figures from his final report that showed UK rail workers to be among the most productive in Europe and admitted in a letter to the TUC that there is "no strong correlation between staff costs in the rail industry and public subsidy."

In Scotland the Rail 2014 consultation launched by the Scottish government is essentially a tartan-covered McNulty that would carve up Scotrail, cut services and staff, increase fares still further and pass more control to the privateers.

And on London Underground, where hundreds of station staff have already been cut, the Tory mayor has come up with an "operational strategy" that would decimate jobs on the network in an effort to plug the gaping funding hole left by the collapse of Tube privatisation.

RMT has made clear where it stands on these attacks.

We will not stand casually by and watch our industry slashed and burned.

Alongside our sister unions we will fight these proposals with every means at our disposal - and if it takes industrial action, then so be it.

But this is an attack on passengers as well and we need to build a united campaign alongside rail users, transport and environmental campaigners and trades councils. It is in all our interests to demand an affordable, public railway that plays a positive role for the economy and the environment.

As usual, it's one rule for working people and another for those who look down on us.

London's Evening Standard reported last week that two Tory MPs were apoplectic about the supposed "platinum-plated" earnings of London Underground train operators.

However, its sensational story about a "^61,000 pay package" was misleading because it included employer's pension contributions.

I am proud that RMT has negotiated a decent basic rate of pay for Tube drivers, who - along with all Tube staff - do a responsible, stressful and socially useful job.

That basic is ^42,424, and compares broadly with the pay of train drivers throughout the industry.

I am proud, too, that they have a final-salary pension scheme that offers some security in retirement, but Tube workers' pensions are no more "platinum plated" than Dominic Raab's or Kwasi Kwarteng's MPs' pensions.

The free travel that Tube workers receive is one that costs nothing to provide, unlike the publicly subsidised food and booze to which Mssrs Raab and Kwarteng are entitled, despite their ^65,000 MPs' salaries.

Of course if you add the 29 per cent employers' pension contributions and various other publicly funded perks to their salaries, they would end up with six-figure "packages."

But why pick on workers anyway?

Board-room pay last year went up by 55 per cent, in inverse proportion to the success of most companies, while Tube workers across the network have delivered record productivity by moving unprecedented numbers of passengers.

And then there are the bankers' bonuses, still being paid at obscene levels out of taxpayers' pockets since we rescued the banks with the biggest act of corporate welfare scrounging in history.

Yet Raab and Kwarteng prefer to rant about the ^250 customer-service bonus that Tube workers receive for doing a job in which they daily risk abuse and assault.

RMT believes that all workers, both public and private-sector, should have decent pay, safe conditions and secure, adequate pensions, and our union will continue proudly to strive for those objects for all the working men and women it represents.

Bob Crow is general secretary of RMT.

It would be no exaggeration to say that our railways face the biggest threat since the dark days of Beeching's axe more than half a century ago.

Of course if you add the 29 per cent employers' pension contributions and various other publicly funded perks to their salaries, they would end up with six-figure "packages."

as a matter of interest, when was anyone's journey on FGW last disrupted by Industrial Action by FGW staff? 

... prices have risen over this period in that in the early days the costs of chartering a train was around ^2,000 to ^3,000 (for a 3 car turbo or double 2-car class 158 up to a maximum of around ^5,000 for an HST for a CLPG excursion train. Our most recent HST charter cost ^12,500, ...