feline1
Member
I wanted to raise a question about how passengers are meant to act when they need to summon assistance on a train.
I had a situation on a busy 10 coach commuter train where a disabled passenger in a wheel chair wanted to disembark (because a double whammy of 2 signal failures had delayed the train so much that she was going to miss her hospital appointment, so there was no point her travelling).
(She needed a ramp to get on or off - 'assisted travel' I think they call it. She'd been assisted onto the train, but as it was now 25 mins past advertised departure time and we still hadn't left yet, she now wanted to get off again, as the journey had become pointless...)
Like many of her fellow passengers, we thought we might ask the guard for assistance... but how to contact him? He was likely about 10 carriages away and the train was so full we could barely fight through 1 carriage, never mind the whole lot.
We tried calling the TOCs customer services number (!) ... but it was permanently on hold.
We tried Twitter! And the TOC's twitter staff did pass a message to 'Control' that this passenger needed assistence... but apparently Control have no direct means to contact the guard? (He has a company mobile, but that's it... and they wouldn't know the number).
So we wondered should we "pull the emergency cord" (it wasn't literally a cord) speak to the driver and ask him to call the conductor.
We chickened out of this, because we were scared we'd be told off (or fined!) because it wasn't an emergency, scared the train would be grounded and thousands of other passengers who *didn't* want to get off would lynch us...
...so basically, the train did depart, the passenger in the wheelchair was trapped inside, and conveyed against her will for nearly a further hour before the conductor finally appeared in our carriage, blissfully unaware he'd been wanted. By this time the poor disabled passenger was having a panic attack, hyperventilating, headbutting the walls and just very distressed and not doing our nerves much good either...
All this made me wonder: just what are you supposed to do as a passenger if you need to get hold of the guard on your train, from anything as mundane as buying a ticket, to non-life-threatening (but obviously pretty distressing) problem like that.
Are you allowed to push the emergency button and get hold of him via the driver? What's the rules?
It did strike me as very odd that we were trying to do it via Twitter (!) and the TOC's Control centre had no way to contact the guard.
I had a situation on a busy 10 coach commuter train where a disabled passenger in a wheel chair wanted to disembark (because a double whammy of 2 signal failures had delayed the train so much that she was going to miss her hospital appointment, so there was no point her travelling).
(She needed a ramp to get on or off - 'assisted travel' I think they call it. She'd been assisted onto the train, but as it was now 25 mins past advertised departure time and we still hadn't left yet, she now wanted to get off again, as the journey had become pointless...)
Like many of her fellow passengers, we thought we might ask the guard for assistance... but how to contact him? He was likely about 10 carriages away and the train was so full we could barely fight through 1 carriage, never mind the whole lot.
We tried calling the TOCs customer services number (!) ... but it was permanently on hold.
We tried Twitter! And the TOC's twitter staff did pass a message to 'Control' that this passenger needed assistence... but apparently Control have no direct means to contact the guard? (He has a company mobile, but that's it... and they wouldn't know the number).
So we wondered should we "pull the emergency cord" (it wasn't literally a cord) speak to the driver and ask him to call the conductor.
We chickened out of this, because we were scared we'd be told off (or fined!) because it wasn't an emergency, scared the train would be grounded and thousands of other passengers who *didn't* want to get off would lynch us...
...so basically, the train did depart, the passenger in the wheelchair was trapped inside, and conveyed against her will for nearly a further hour before the conductor finally appeared in our carriage, blissfully unaware he'd been wanted. By this time the poor disabled passenger was having a panic attack, hyperventilating, headbutting the walls and just very distressed and not doing our nerves much good either...
All this made me wonder: just what are you supposed to do as a passenger if you need to get hold of the guard on your train, from anything as mundane as buying a ticket, to non-life-threatening (but obviously pretty distressing) problem like that.
Are you allowed to push the emergency button and get hold of him via the driver? What's the rules?
It did strike me as very odd that we were trying to do it via Twitter (!) and the TOC's Control centre had no way to contact the guard.