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Transport Secretary Grant Shapps is set to meet the Prime Minister and Chancellor next week to discuss the potential crisis. Plans are reportedly being drawn up for freight trains to take priority over passenger services to keep supermarkets stocked if strikes go ahead.

A senior rail source said: “We want to keep people and goods moving but there is no doubt we face serious challenges. There is an awful lot of work going on behind the scenes, including around what the timetable might look like. One option is times of the day when only freight services operate.”

Rail unions have warned of a “summer of discontent” unless they get double-digit pay increases in line with inflation. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers is currently balloting more than 40,000 members across 15 train operators over a national strike.

The potential action is over redundancies and a demand for “a guarantee there will be no detrimental changes to working practices”. 

Rail minister Wendy Morton insisted that rail workers have already received greater pay increases in the past decade than teachers, nurses, firefighters and ambulance staff.

She added that possible strike action “threatens to return us to gloomier days”.

A spokesman for the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train operators, said: “As an industry we have to change our ways of working and improve productivity to help pay our own way.

“The alternatives of asking tax-payers to shoulder even more of the burden, or passengers to pay even higher fares when they, too, are feeling the pinch, simply isn’t fair.”

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