Rail unions call for more protection for staff and travellers after Cambridgeshire train stabbings | Cambridgeshire

Rail unions have called for greater protection for staff and passengers following a mass stabbing attack on an LNER train in Cambridgeshire.

The incident shed new light on transport safety in the wake of budget cuts affecting police numbers and railway staff. While details are still emerging, the actions of the ship’s crew appear to have played a significant role in limiting the number and severity of casualties.

Both the RMT and TSSA unions were quick to praise rail staff and call for further action. RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey said he would “seek urgent meetings with the government, rail employers and the police to ensure we have the strongest possible support, resources and robust procedures”.

TSSA general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust called on the LNER and the government to “act quickly to review safety, support affected workers and ensure nothing like this happens again”.

Although a train’s boxcars heighten all kinds of threats, cases of fatal violence on the train are virtually unknown. The LNER attacks are reminiscent of the brutal murder of a passenger on a train in Guildford, Surrey, in 2019; a similarly gruesome knife attack, which made headlines for its extraordinary randomness and rarity.

The kind of airport security that can locate the weapons used on an LNER train is a feature of only one rail operator and station in Britain, the Eurostar in London St Pancras: an international rail service that competes with airlines and travels about 30 miles through the Channel tunnel, where X-ray scanners and security lanes are deemed essential.

But even a scaled-down version like the detector belt would probably be useless for everyday rail travel: it would cause more queues and delays than most passengers would consider acceptable, and would require far more investment in infrastructure and people than the cash-strapped rail industry and the Treasury would accept.

A former chief constable of the British Transport Police was quick to rule out the possibility. “It’s not going to happen,” former BTP chief Andy Trotter told LBC radio. But he said more investment could help: in facial recognition, random searches and on people, whether police or railway staff.

BTP is financed by rail, and with wages rising faster than inflation, successive governments have generally sought ways to save money. These initiatives included cutting police budgets, eliminating ticket booths, increasing driver-only operations and replacing station staff, all of which were opposed by unions.

The overall number of recorded attacks on railways has increased significantly in recent years; It reached 10,231, the highest annual number, an increase of 7 percent compared to the figures announced last week.

However, the Department of Rail and Road’s headline figures contain much larger records of harassment or widespread attacks, which may include threatening behaviour. This accounts for 80% of the total number. In this context, more than 1.7 billion passenger journeys took place on UK rail last year.

However, railway staff reported that fear of attack was widespread. A 2024 report by the Railroad Safety and Standards Board said 2,793 railroad workers were injured or traumatized by assault or harassment the previous year. In an online survey of hundreds of TSSA members, nearly 40% reported gun-related incidents.

Eslamdoust said: “Security and staffing go hand in hand: You can’t talk about safety while saving money on people keeping others safe.”