Posted in News/interest Friday, December 16th, 2011
I recently watched the following on-line video where a foul mouthed youth on a Scotrail service was removed from the train by another passenger, after he had refused to pay his fare, and the guard then refused to move the train until he did. While not getting into the specifics of this incident this is a perennial problem facing on train ticket staff, as Chris Brown the owner of this website found when he was a Conductor Guard on South West Trains in the late 1990s.
As more railway stations become unstaffed it is the Guards and Travelling Ticket Inspectors* job to catch any fare dodgers. While a lot of stations are now equipped with ticket gates, these can only be used if there is a member of staff present, with the result that most evenings, the gates at smaller stations are unmanned and left in the open position.
Another factor to take into account is following the break up of British Railways and the separation of wheel and rail into the train operating companies running the trains and Network rail maintaining the track, has been the creation of new departments employing hundreds of staff within each fragment of the railway under the heading of Delay Attribution. The idea is that each delay should be attributed by the minute to either a TOC or Network Rail. ( London Waterloo worked out at around £15 a minute some years ago), while a five minute peak hour delay in the platform at Waterloo would appear to only cost £75, it’s the delay to all the other trains in that peak that can add up to over a 1,000 minutes that makes it serious money.
When this system was first set up over 15 years ago mad cow disease was on the front pages of news papers using its Latin initials B.S.E. This acronym was quickly stolen by the railway to stand for Blame Someone Else. At first sight it seems quite a simple concept, if it’s a fault on a train, its down to the TOC, fault on the track Network Rail, it’s the loading of other the minutes subsequent delays that the individual delay attribution staff study, dissect, and fight about.
To give you an example of how a few minutes delay can balloon out of all proportion is one evening I was booked to work a train off platform 8 at Guildford. The normal train formation was a four car unit, but on the night in question I found I had an eight car train, when I went to open up the cab at the front of the train I found that the AWS ( Automatic Warning System) magnet was directly over the track magnet, with the result that the warning horn could not be cancelled and I could not charge up the brakes to move the train. The standard practice in the past had been to isolate the AWS equipment, move the train a few feet, then reset the equipment, however following an accident where the AWS had been found to have been isolated, it was decreed that if for any reason the seal on this equipment had been broken, then the train would have to come out of service.
Although the unit was fitted with a two way radio, I could not use it because of the noise from the AWS horn blaring away, so I used the signal post telephone to explain my problem to the signalman, and ask for permission to carry out isolation of the cab equipment. By this time each portion of the fragmented railway had its own higher management structure known on the railway as Control, so the signalman phoned his control, who then phoned my control who were not even in the same building ,and a message eventually came back as no. All this time my signal had been green, and there was a cross country train to Scotland waiting to follow me on platform six.
My next suggestion was with the signalmans permission, I would go to the back cab of my eight car train, move it a few feet to get the front cab off the magnet, then return to the front cab to work the service away from Guildford. Once this was agreed it still took around five minutes to run to the back of the train open up the cab, get the guards permission to move the train, and then to return the front cab to work the train with about 15 to 20 minutes delay. At the end of duty I put a report in explaining the reason for the delay and thought no more of it.
Two days later I was taken off my turn of duty to see my manager, he said the delay minutes claimed by Rail Track for this incident were over 2,000 because the cross country service had lost its path way and had delayed other trains on its journey north. He showed me a print out of the lost minutes which even included 21 minutes delay for the empty stock working from Glasgow Central to its depot early the following morning!
The argument came down basically to had the previous driver stopped the unit in the wrong part of the platform, I did not think he had, or was the AWS magnet in the wrong place on the track for an eight car train. SWT had to take the minutes. However I did notice some time later that AWS magnet on the track was moved further down the platform.
After that rather lengthy explanation on how the fragmented railway now works, I now go back to the dilemma facing the guard on a train with a passenger who refuses to pay his fare. He has three options, 1 He could ignore the person and carry on checking the other passengers tickets, but this would underline to other passengers that they could travel without buying a ticket 2 Refuse to move until the nonpayer gets off the train, or pays his fare, his TOC would not thank him for getting a £10 pound fare, while incurring twenty minutes lost time at £5 to £15 a minute with out counting the cost of any further delays to other trains, 3 He could phone ahead to ask for the British Transport Police to meet the train at a major station and let them deal with it, of course the fare evader may get off prior to this, but the guard would have done his best without delaying trains or its passengers.
As for another passenger getting involved in evicting this foul mouth yob off the train, only time will tell if this results in a police prosecution. I hope not but stranger things have happened.
* Travelling Ticket Inspectors have been renamed as R.P.O.s Revenue Protection Officers.
Leave a Reply