Southern guards are being used by the RMT high ups.
Sadly there is very much this feeling amongst some Southern conductors right now, but given concern for the safety of the railway and the outright numbers of onboard staff of any description within a few years, there is also a feeling that this is still a perfectly valid dispute.
RMT have just been told by their lawyers that telling their members not to do new route learning is illegal, so they have just withdrawn the instruction. If they had not,their guards could have been liable to civil costs & unchallengable sacking.
Have you a source for that as that makes no sense.
Southern are short on guards so can't exactly release them for route learning. Further more if this grand scheme idea of making guards sign a new OBS contract come the end of August there won't be a requirement for route knowledge as the services become DOO. Why spend the money on route learning?
Source is the RMT website. With the changes being made some depots are gaining new routes. Selhurst I believe it says on the RMT site.
XDM is, on this occasion, basically correct. Some depots are operating with rather better proportions of productive conductors than others. Some, but not all, Selhurst conductors are learning at least one additional and (for them) entirely new route. This involves further trains which are definitely not able to run DOO for the time being.
A second trained member of staff who isn't first aid trained and isn't allowed to drive the train in an emergency. C'mon RMT you're going to have to do better than that to get the passengers on your side.
Well, Guards do have enough first aid training to put a bandage on a head. It's not rocket science. If there was a Neurosurgeon or A&E consultant on board, it is pretty-much all they could do in that scenario.
New Southern conductor entrants have not been given first aid training for quite some time. This is not to say that they have not been trained in other ways in dealing with ill passenger scenarios; indeed this would have been something every recently-qualified conductor would have discussed at length in their training.
A driver collapsing scenario is not endangering the train to a large extent - it will delay it, but that's a different scenario. That's what the various safety systems in the cab are there to mitigate, and the decision was made many years ago that one Driver was all that was needed.
Oh, I dunno about that! I've dealt with instances of unresponsive drivers before, and I dread to think what would happen on a rammed summer evening peak express from Victoria if there was nobody to reassure passengers and react immediately to find out what's going on. Delays = danger with the level of overcrowding on the GTR network. I know signallers can make PA announcements and alert the MOM, but their ability to actually see and get a feel for a train's loading, what's going on in the cabs, and create an appropriate response, is very much reliant on either a conductor or the off-chance of appropriate staff in the vicinity who are trained to respond. I know which I'd rather if that meant it prevented people from pulling the egresses and wandering off down the lineside.
I agree that some of the traditional Guard roles have gone (as some Drivers roles), but the basic role of "Guarding the Passengers (from themselves)" is still there, and still required. I do agree, this message is not getting across as well as it could, through a combination of misleading statements from Management, and inerta from the travelling public.
Most of a Guards duties are low-key, and for this reason, are not recognised - indeed, on a lot of trains, are not needed. However, once they are not there, then they will be missed.
In a strange sort of way, OBS roles would still be able to guard passengers from themselves just as much as a conductor would; the bad thing is that they would probably not, however, be able to guard them from incidents external to their own behaviour. An OBS (while they exist) working on targeted trains or a conductor on a selection of vast 12-coach behemoths rattling down the mainline with 2mins between stops will, in my opinion, have roughly the same chance of finding and dealing with disruptive behaviour. Neither of the two would be a bad thing. But a conductor would also be able to prevent something kicking off by explaining and offering reassurance in the event of a severe delay due to a fatality, or a train fault, or a loss of signalling; an OBS may not be trained to recognise or deal with any of these, and may not be able to do anything more than offer vague support which won't wash. Let alone dealing with the technical side of any incident ranging from an accidental division through to a door fault.
'Chef du Train' literally translates to Head of the Train, which sounds more like Train Manager to me
Pretty much! AIUI.
