Guard vs Youths

[aavm]

Early Saturday evening.
A Southern train from the south coast to London Victoria. I'm about the only person in the last carriage of maybe 8.
A bunch of male youths enter the carriage, walk to the end, and sit in the first class area. They are mildly anti social (noisy, loud music, larking about).
At a stop, they letch & cat call at a pretty girl on the platform. Thankfully, she doesn't notice.
The guard enters, checking tickets. He sees them at the end in first class, hesitates, decides not to approach them, and leaves. I don't blame him.
Later, the guard comes back, and quietly sits at the far end of the carriage. I'm hoping he's called ahead for reinforcements.
However the youths (& I) alight at East Croydon.

 

[DM352]

They have cameras in the trains and at East Croydon. There are also face recognition technologies out there. The issue is if caught the punishment plus their parent(s) would say Jimmy would never do a thing like that.

I remember the days when I would catch a train around 1500 on the Cross City and there would be youths boarding and doing similar anti social behaviour still in their school uniforms!

 

[diffident]

Early Saturday evening.
A Southern train from the south coast to London Victoria. I'm about the only person in the last carriage of maybe 8.
A bunch of male youths enter the carriage, walk to the end, and sit in the first class area. They are mildly anti social (noisy, loud music, larking about).
At a stop, they letch & cat call at a pretty girl on the platform. Thankfully, she doesn't notice.
The guard enters, checking tickets. He sees them at the end in first class, hesitates, decides not to approach them, and leaves. I don't blame him.
Later, the guard comes back, and quietly sits at the far end of the carriage. I'm hoping he's called ahead for reinforcements.
However the youths (& I) alight at East Croydon.

Sounds on the face of it that the guard was monitoring them whilst not confronting them, possibly awaiting assistance at Victoria. If I were him, I'd do the same thing.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Aug 2022 ==

They have cameras in the trains and at East Croydon. There are also face recognition technologies out there. The issue is if caught the punishment plus their parent(s) would say Jimmy would never do a thing like that.

I remember the days when I would catch a train around 1500 on the Cross City and there would be youths boarding and doing similar anti social behaviour still in their school uniforms!

If you're talking about the Cross City in Brum, it's way way worse now. I was on it today coming home from Birmingham out to Bournville, and there was open dope smoking on the go along with the loud music and an uncomfortable atmosphere. Not a good way to travel these days that's for sure. I certainly wouldn't get the Cross City late at night out of Birmingham going home, I opt for an Uber these days.

 

[RJ]

Early Saturday evening.
A Southern train from the south coast to London Victoria. I'm about the only person in the last carriage of maybe 8.
A bunch of male youths enter the carriage, walk to the end, and sit in the first class area. They are mildly anti social (noisy, loud music, larking about).
At a stop, they letch & cat call at a pretty girl on the platform. Thankfully, she doesn't notice.
The guard enters, checking tickets. He sees them at the end in first class, hesitates, decides not to approach them, and leaves. I don't blame him.
Later, the guard comes back, and quietly sits at the far end of the carriage. I'm hoping he's called ahead for reinforcements.
However the youths (& I) alight at East Croydon.

The train ran, the guard avoided a situation they probably felt would lead to a confrontation. Can't blame the guard for wanting a peaceful life. We don't know if they were known troublemakers. I don't see what the guard done wrong here. Policing the first class sections of those trains is probably more trouble than it is worth. As for anti-social youths, did anybody ask them to turn the music down? If the carriage was empty they might have just been enjoying themselves and thought no more of it. The girl probably did notice them but pretended not to - sadly such experiences are probably quite common for someone of her demographic.

Once I got the 0350 from Brighton to London one Sunday morning - a load of youths were running around the station at Brighton, climbing over and crawling under the barriers. The station staff were happy to let them be taken away on the train to "clear them of the platform". No police were called despite the BTP having a base at the station. Those youths spent the journey steaming up and down the length of the train, robbing sleeping passengers. The guard was nowhere to be seen while they were on the train, but did appear some 2 hours later pretty soon after the youths had gotten off at East Croydon, where again they were running up and down.

I was travelling with a friend who had slept through all this - personally I would not advise anybody to make plans to sleep on trains without a private cabin or any public transport - it's not a safe place to do so and you can't rely on anybody but yourself to protect yourself against bad actors.

 

[yorkie]

Later, the guard comes back, and quietly sits at the far end of the carriage. I'm hoping he's called ahead for reinforcements.
However the youths (& I) alight at East Croydon.

Very possibly/probably, yes.

There are times when I have been in the presence of someone I don't want to challenge without backup at work and will call for assistance.

Sometimes the assistance is available straight away and sometimes it takes a while.

Every job is different but I can see parallels here and it sounds like the Guard (or OBS?) did the right thing in my opinion.

It's unfortunate they got away before backup could arrive, but hopefully next time they won't be so lucky.