Life on the lines with the BTP
PAUL STEPHEN visits the British Transport Police offices at Cambridge, to discover what life is like policing Britain’s railways
Cambridge is hardly known for being a hotbed of crime or anti-social behaviour. The city is a far cry from the counter-terrorism activities and armed patrols associated with London - the constant scourge that is bicycle theft and the drunken misadventures of the city’s large student population might seem more akin to the idea of law enforcement in this ancient seat of learning.
Away from the colleges and the classical façade of the 1845-built Eastern Counties Railway station, PC Paul Gray and the British Transport Police’s new offices are located in the shadow of Cambridge Power Signal Box.
What is immediately apparent is the expanse of Cambridge BTP’s patrol area - Gray can be called to any part of the railway network throughout West Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, West Suffolk and North West Essex.
Falling within its jurisdiction are long and sparsely populated sections of the Fen Line to King’s Lynn via Ely, the Breckland Line to Norwich via Thetford, and routes from Ely to Ipswich and to Peterborough via March. To the south of the city are its two routes to London via Hitchin or Bishop’s Stortford.
“Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Stevenage and Peterborough are the nearest other BTP stations, and we fill the big gap in the middle,” says Gray.
“From here we cover an area ranging from the Wash and King’s Lynn all the way down to Stansted Airport. And we have ten million passengers going through Cambridge every year, which is a major, major station.
“I did 11 years on the Underground and now 11 years here, and it’s completely different. There’s a big contrast between rural and urban policing - out here we are everything.”
Sitting within the Eastern region of the BTP’s territorial sub-structure, there are just six PCs and a sergeant based at Cambridge. The prevalence of crime and the number of call-outs is unsurprisingly a small fraction of the level officers must respond to in the capital, but the disparity in available resources necessitates a much wider-reaching job specification for the officers on provincial duty.
“We don’t have squads here, we don’t have CID, and anything specialist we have to call in from elsewhere,” Gray explains.
“Out here we will deal with everything from beginning to end. We don’t just arrest people and hand them over - we do all the investigation, CCTV requests and so on. Unless it’s a major crime, which we will hand over to CID.
“If someone’s in custody, and that could be in Braintree, King’s Lynn, Newmarket or wherever, I will travel out and deal with them from the first interview right through to gathering evidence for any subsequent investigation and preparing the file for the Crown Prosecution Service.”
In keeping with most similarly-sized BTP stations, Cambridge is not manned 24 hours a day, nor are all six PCs ever all on call at the same time. Working in eight- or ten-hour shifts, the station only stays open for as long as