Great Western Coffee Shop

On the 1930 fro pad to bri and the tm is a slight woman and the buffet girl is even slighter.

A group of about 20 middle aged drunks got on at reading - and I don't mean just slightly tipsy.  Tm cleared them out of f as soon as they got on but as soon as she went  through they invaded again.  Being very very rowdy.

So I went to find her and she cleared them out again - so now I'm subjected to cat calls about the miserable fat bird won't let us sit down.  I could move but I won't then they'll have won.

Now the issue have with this is:

1, why do fgw send out trains on Friday and Saturday nights with just two women on board - surely common sense would put one man on

2, why are they still being served when half of them can't even stand up without support. Btheyve cleared out the supply of carling and Stella since reading and were not at swindon yet

Lunacy

1. It would be illegal, not allowed to discriminate duties between male and female. 
2. Possibly because it causes less trouble than to refuse them, a pub can call plod on a train more difficult

Lunacy agreed

Hells bells Mookie. Equality and all that. This is the 21st century.

yes it is

And I'm the first to deal with equality and probably one of the first to shout about inequality

BUT

If you want to accept the idea of equality you also have to accept the idea that there are things omen can do men can't and vice versa

However having thought about it, as much as it irritates the pax I can see the logic of having women staff on late night trains - less chance of alpha male confrontation

Part of accepting equality is acknowledging the differences that make us equal

I agree with your sentiments mookiemoo.

Having worked in the 'pub' trade I've witnessed many incidents where a female member of staff has dealt with trouble far better than her male counterparts.

I've got the broken nose as proof that my methods of conflict resolution are perhaps not as good!

This is all about anti-social behaviour by one group of people which is distressing and offensive to another.  I think the issue about whether the on-train staff are male or female is irrelevant: I am not FGW's biggest fan but I acknolwedge that the vast majority of TM's I come across, both male and female, seem to be pretty good at what they do including conflict resolution (even if I've only witnessed it wrt invlaid tickets), and I really don't think that barring females from working on certain trains is the way anyone would want to go.  What next?  Female passengers can't travel on certain trains?

It sounds like it WAS a mistake to keep serving them alcohol if they were clearly drunk already.  The buffets are pretty secure and if necesssary it could have been shut. 

I hope th Police were called to meet the train at Swindon, but the problem is that this kind of yobbish behaviour is accepted these days.  Maybe Theresa May is going to fix all this ......

I can really sympathise. There are some Saturday night late trains where its difficult to sit anywhere without some form of hassle/noise/abuse. Also on Saturday afternoons during the football season.

I would expect if I had paid a first class ticket for a) the other people in that carriage to hold a first class ticket b) to sit there without feeling harrased or abused.

If it were flying you wouldn't be allowed to travel if you were drunk, you wouldn't be given more alcohol and if certain levels of behaviour weren't adhered to you would be arrested/thrown off.

Maybe there is case for "dry" trains ie soft drinks only on Saturday evenings.  At my reckoning I see unreasonable behaviour (abuse, excessive noise, drunkenness) in about one in every twenty trips. I have been particulary impressed with Southern's recent approach seeing more police and support officers across their trains. Maybe time for FGW to reconsider how they deal with rowdy passengers particularly on late night Saturday trains.

I tend to agree with BNM on this one - firstly hats off to the TM for dealing with the situation rather than hiding. But I've seen a few occasions when women have done an excellent job of conflict resolution which I think might have been better than a man. It's an overgeneralization, obviously, but I think that things are often less likely to degenerate into physical assault if there's a female member of staff rather than a male.

As for still selling booze, yes, doesn't seem sensible but almost certainly the path of least resistance for the steward.

Dry trains - good idea in principle but the main problem isn't usually people getting drunk on board, it's them being drunk when they got on.

Very difficult to enforce unless you have the entire BTP PSU on the train with you, as in the case of the Millwall special on Saturday.
Train wasn't that wrecked apparently, considering Millwall lost. Still it went straight back to the Oak.

From the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-11414228):