(20 Nov 2016, 12:48 am)James101 wrote Totally happy to say I'm with Southern on that particular kerfuffle. There's some specific examples of them handling the situation badly, but overall they're not any worse than the unions. I wouldn't mind RMT coming out to say they're just job-protecting but it's silly to hide behind unfounded safety claims.

DOO is not the way forward. Any number of things can happen on a train; fully-trained guards carry out the protection of the train in some circumstances. This leaves someone on the train to look after passengers. 
Remove this guard and everything then goes down to the driver - hardly more safe?

In the recent derailment at Watford Junction luckily these services were not DOO so passengers were seen and treated promptly by the guard whilst the driver did all other necessary tasks - ordinarily these would have come before passenger safety.
Ask yourself this. If a driver becomes incapacitated, such as the recent incident at Barking where a driver sadly died, it was only down to another train nearby stopping to check and investigate. Had a guard been on board things would've happened much faster and potentially his life could have been saved.

Operation of train doors (this seems to be the only 'petty' thing that the media love to report on because they're 100% unbiased) is a task that is safer in the hands of a guard - it's only natural that the driver is in charge of driving the train; not continuously checking to see if anyone is trying to make the train they've just missed, slipping and ending up underneath it. A guard would see this, shout to stand back, or if something unfortunate happens, stop the train.

Removing all of this for the sake of cost cutting is absolutely ludicrous; as well as putting dozens of people out of jobs (or degrading their workers' rights which have been hard earned) needlessly.