It's also fairly pointless, because the miscreant (or anybody else) can just pull the egress.
I tend to find that about 50% of the people who are daft enough to do something needing BTP attendance are also not intelligent enough to work out what an emergency egress handle does... so you have a good chance of containing them.
(Didn't someone once smash the window of a Virgin train service to escape after doing something brutal onboard - rather than use the egress? I seem to remember it might have been something really quite nasty like murder or attempted murder.)
The main problem, however, is that the longer you lock somebody into a metal box, the more likely they are to lash out at all and sundry (not just staff) and cause danger to entirely innocent bystanders. Once somebody really kicks off on a train, you have precious little space to do anything about it, other than release them. If they're properly frustrated with a member of staff or have a grudge about the railway, you can release them and they may actually still end up hanging around the station and get nicked whenever some form of police attendance appears.
I'd probably agree there. It really needs to be paralleled roughly with what would happen elsewhere in society off the railway. If, say, Police would hold people in a pub after a fight there for a period of time, they would probably be reasonable doing it on a train as well. But if someone nicked a packet of sweets (~= fare-dodged a couple of stops) it would be over the top.
Exactly if the police are on the phone and only moments away they will sometimes request this. I've been on a train where this has happened when when a person in charge of a child was massively under the influence. The guard waited a minute at the most until they could see BTP on the platform. That was on TPE also.
It always strikes me that anybody on here who has had the BTP respond so quickly that they are "only moments away" is very lucky indeed!
From numerous experiences recently, including at very major stations, 9 out of 10 times they'll be 50 miles away and can't even get to the train on a blue light run with half an hour's notice. The more serious incidents have had to be passed to local police forces.
When BTP do turn up, I have found they're invariably courteous and helpful and do tend to get the job done quickly, but holding a train with its doors locked, waiting for them to turn up, is definitely likely to result in complaints from otherwise civilised passengers who've been caught up in the issue.
