with respect friend had you read the content of the thread in more depth you would see we had covered this ground alread and yes common sense is the key to it all of course, from both staff and enthusiasts, we are all responsible for this countries infrastructure and the safety of and can all help each other.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
No, they don't work for us. They work for their respective TOCs.
and the TOCs work for?? DOH!!!, :roll:
no inseriousness a countries infrastructure is there to support the people of that country and its economy, i.e. US, the people, be it for moving goods or customers, its a public transport system which basically means it supports (or should support) the public, and likewish we support it in return. so to reiterate, basically thats a long way round of saying !they work for us", I though thid was understandable?
And whilst we should expect them to be civil and courteous to their customers* , we should be extending the same to them. Sadly this doesn't seem to be the case with some enthusiasts who just 'fly off the handle' with staff when they're just doing their job.
It the enthusiasts you approch fly off the handle you should seriously question the way you approach your customers, do rail servants recieve customer care training for direct work with customers? I only ask because i genuinely don`t know?
It works both ways of course and takes two to argue, on a personal level I treat everyone in exactly the same way as I expect to be treated myself, unfortunately it would appear others have a different agenda, indeed a very small percentage of rail servants seem untrained and unprofessional in attitude, but of course you find this in all walks of life, a few always slip through the interview process, so we have to accept this to a point.
Of course some enthusiasts also leave a little to be desired and I can understand the attitudes of some station rail servants. However since we are both supporting, and have an interest in basically the same thing, it only takes a little bit of respect and courtesey from both sides, to prevent any issue of enthusiasts being threatend with being escourted from a railway station and a railway servants being reported and disciplined over their inappropriate behaviour and conduct.
* of course, it's debatable if an enthusiast who just turns up on a station without a ticket and with no intention to travel is really a customer, or just a visitor.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
"of course, it's debatable if an enthusiast who just turns up on a station without a ticket and with no intention to travel is really a customer, or just a visitor."
this is an interesting one and a contentious one also, I often see my children off at Manchester Piccadilly when they return to university, it is me who pays their rails fares, yet in theory I`m not travelling that day, i`m still however a customer and have a right to be there. I also occassionally see my wife off on railway journeys and because she suffers from rhumatic I have to help her with her baggages, you never see to be able to find a porter these days, in addition I`m also a rail enthusist and like many on here a very loyal customer who has spend many thousands of pounds supporting the railways over the last 50 or so so, so on the occassion that I visit the station without travelling either to see my children offto university or take a few photographs of trains, do I lose my customer status??, no of course I dont, thats just ridiculous.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
heres something which may be worth noting;
Once upon a time people who worked on the railways used to describe themselves as "railway servants". The phrase nicely captures the sense of public service, the combination of pride and duty, that defines how people see their job. It is tempting to say that this sense was destroyed by rail privatisation - the replacement of public service by private profit. Tempting, but wrong. The great age of the railway servant was actually that of the Great Western Railway and its sister companies in the era before the 1947-48 nationalisation.
This is a salutary warning against sloppy and self-indulgent thinking about the ethos of public service. We need to shed the myths that fog the rhetoric. One myth makes public service ethos synonymous with public sector ethos. Another suggests that people who work in the public sector are somehow kinder, nicer or more altruistic than people who work in the private sector. As well as letting public sector workers who provide lousy service off the hook, this is insulting to all those people - for example, care home staff - who perform caring roles in the private sector. A further myth is that there is some kind of acceptable trade-off between public service and decent pay, whereas the argument should be that good public service deserves good reward.
None of this necessary myth-shedding means that the public service ethos itself is a myth or is not worth bothering about. Exactly the opposite, in fact. It is because the idea of an ethos of public service is so important that it is crucial to strip away the obfuscating rhetoric that frequently surrounds it. Nor is it enough to celebrate it in the abstract. It has to be given some practical content if it is to be successfully integrated into the way public services work. That is what the public administration select committee tried to do last year in its report, The Public Service Ethos. It argued that the active cultivation of a public service ethos should be at the heart of the government's public service reform programme. Its role should not be as a comforting phrase to be inserted into ministerial speeches when the occasion demands, but as a challenging aspiration for all providers of public services.
We wanted to see it translated into a public service code, setting out the key public service principles, and provided a version of what such a code might contain. It should be brief, simple and accessible, providing an operational ethos for all public service workers. We also floated the idea of a public service academy, with a mission to disseminate public service principles and practice among all those engaged in the provision of public services.
Pie in the sky? It need not be. It means taking what is distinctive about a public service, in terms of equity and accountability, and converting this into standards of ethical behaviour, service delivery, administrative competence and democratic accountability. All organisations can take service seriously, but public service demands more. This is why private providers of public services should have to accept public service obligations, including openness and the proper treatment of staff, if they want to engage in public service. Similarly, any contracting that prevents staff providing a seamless service, or going the extra yard to meet the needs of citizens, is bad contracting.
Ethos is about culture. As such it is fundamental to how organisations work, and how the people who work in them see their job. When someone describes themselves as a "public servant", this is testimony to the power of an ethos. It is seen in action in the daily heroism of many public service workers. This is a priceless asset for an organisation (people do not describe themselves as "private servants"), but only if it is nourished and cultivated. The public service ethos has to be more than warm words.
I think you`ll find there is a little more to it than that and thats exactly the kind of attitude i`m expect from a body that is purely financially orientated. All I can sugget is that you read some of my other thread and allow me to point out that the presence of enthusiasts on platforms are extra eyes and ears to aid security, please work with us, not against us, its as much our network as it is your.
, Should have said you were staff 
