Guards are essential

The letter from Angie Doll ( Open

Access, RAIL 835) is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt by Southern management to have us believe they are giving passengers something new with this on-board supervisors (OBS) role.

She claims they are “trained to check and issue tickets as well as give travel advice”, and that “it is very much part of their job”. But guards do this already, as well as providing the safety role and the reassurance to passengers, as stated in the adjacent letter from Martin James.

She tries to justify the OBS by two examples, but both of these passengers were lucky there was an OBS on their service. Don’t forget, an OBS is not mandatory, whereas a guard is. The examples quoted are nothing that a guard wouldn’t or couldn’t do, so to give the impression that these examples can only be done by an OBS is presenting a false position.

I’m surprised more is not being made of the removal of guards, in the way that disabled passengers will be discriminated against by the lack of accessibility.

To give a recent example on Northern, on a journey from Doncaster to Leeds, a wheelchair user was assisted by the guard onto the train at Bentley (unstaffed), and assisted to disembark at Leeds, again by the guard as there were no platform staff available.

Had the service been Driver Only Operation, or running Driver Controlled Operation without an OBS, the wheelchair user would not have been able to travel. Even had an OBS been on board, it would have been unlikely they would have been able to render assistance, whereas the guard, actually getting off the train, saw the wheelchair user and gave assistance.

Worse, though, had this been a DOO service and the passenger been assisted to board at Doncaster, they would not have been able to disembark at Leeds due to platform staff being unavailable.

The industry is losing sight of the value the guard role provides.