London Banter - View Single Post

Clive Page[_3_] · November 21st 19, 08:14 PM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london

On 21/11/2019 14:36, wrote:
I was sitting in a Great Northern train at Finsbury Park this afternoon when
a Thameslink train pulled in and a couple of women ran out to catch our train.
Now a normal person in the cab would have waited for them to get on, but no,
not the one in our train - he shut the doors in their faces.

So either:
A) He wasn't monitoring the platforms when he shut the doors or
B) He's a complete jobsworth tit and waiting 5 seconds beyond the booked leaving
time was Not On.

Either way it was a pretty obnoxious thing to do. Luckily ****s like him seem
to be rarer these days.

I believe that the drivers on the Thameslink route are specifically instructed by the management to do this.

A year or two back I made a formal complaint about a driver at Luton Airport Parkway deliberately closing the doors when lots of people were still boarding - and this was when there had been a platform alteration notified to passengers just a minute before the train arrival. I had fortunately been standing right by the steps to the overbridge and was capable of running up one flight and down the other, but anyone not being in the right place or not athletic enough (which was most of them) had no chance of changing platform. It must have been very obvious to the driver that he had been signalled into another platform at the last minute but he took no account of this and I expect he delighted in pulling away with only a fraction of the normal load. To my surprise and dismay the management backed him up - they said that avoiding even a few seconds of delay was more important than allowing passengers affected by a platform change to react to it.

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Clive Page