PROTESTERS have been told to leave Glasgow’s Central station after staging a noisy demonstration in support of striking rail workers.

Members of trade unions including RMT, Unison, Unite and the EIS entered the largely empty station on Wednesday morning holding banners, chanting and playing loud music.

Supporters of the UK-wide rail strikes held a large banner reading “solidarity with the strikes” and sang and danced along to a version of Freed from Desire with lyrics about the RMT union.

“The RMT’s on fire, Network Rail is terrified,” the group chanted.

Our sister title The National captured footage of the demonstration.

Police arrived minutes into the protest and advised the protesters to leave the station and turn off the music, but the singing and chanting continued.

July 27 was the first day back on the picket lines for members of the RMT union after three days of strike action on June 23, 25, and 27.

More than 40,000 workers across the UK are expected to have walked out. Network Rail said only around half of Britain’s rail network will be open on strike days, with a very limited service running on lines that will only be open from around 07:30 to 18:30.

Travellers have also been warned to expect disruption on the morning of Thursday, July 28.

The RMT's Scotland organiser, Gordon Martin, said that the way negotiations are going it looked likely that there would be further pickets on August 18 and 20.

National Rail said that they had put a pay deal on the table which would have been worth an 8% payrise over two years. The firm said this came with a no-compulsory-redundancy guarantee and other benefits but said the RMT left the talks.

The trade union's general secretary, Mick Lynch, claimed Network Rail had "upped the ante, threatening to impose compulsory redundancies and unsafe 50% cuts to maintenance work if we did not withdraw our planned strike action".