Women-only carriages on the Underground

Whenever I hear about this sort of thing, I have a rye smile to myself. For years we've had nothing but 'equality, equality, equalty' Now they've got it, it seems they only want to cherry pick the best bits. What's next? Gay only carriages? I'm being serious here. I'm now retired and in my working life, one of the best bosses I worked for was a woman, and no doubt we've all had male bosses who you wonder gave them the job.

Harriet Harperson bleats on about more women in Parliament. I always thought promotion/selection call it what you like was down to ability, suitabity and not quota. (Rant over)

We certainly had these on mainline railways in the past (last were withdrawn in 1977), but I'm not sure it was ever utilised on the underground.

And the Parliamentary U/S mooted this at the Tory Conference this year, btw, so Harriet Harman will be delighted to know she's being credited with reviving the idea!!


UPDATE!!!

Yes, they did have them, on the Met at least, according to images at LT museum, from which the era concerned looks to be c. 1925-1935.

Would this not be in breach of sexual equality laws?

Women only compartments were a common feature of the old slam door compartment stock but the provision of open stock precluded the continuation of the practice and it would be impossible on the 'S' stock for example. The idea was originally so that women could have some privacy for things such as breast feeding. Whereas when it was introduced the vast majority of commuters were male there was no difficulty in reserving a small number of compartments for females today the numbers of female commuters is equal or possibly greater than males.

I think the Southern's 4SUBs were the last to have women only compartments, abolished in the 1970s.

If I remember correctly, there are quite a few metro system, across the world that utilise women only carriages. For the most part they are present because of sexual harassment, famously in japan. I think that we can say that we don't have that sort of problem as much in london, or the UK.

And as some have hinted at above, equality doesn't mean positive discrimination! Who else would be in favour of "blokes hour" to become a show on radio 4 - a bunch of men come on and talk about blokey things, like BBQs, DIY, and Beer? No doubt that some people would be up in arms about it though

They also had them on the Liverpool Street trains as well. There were still a few as late as the early 80's as I saw them on the Southminster branch. (I lived in Burnham-on-Crouch 1983-1989).

They were on the unrefurbished compartment stock. After refurbishment the stock was no longer compartment stock (IIRC class 303/305).

I don't think that was the point of the red stripe. As I recall, there was a murder on a train on the Southern Region in 1988, after which it was decided to operate the few remaining trains with compartments and no corridor only in the peaks (when the chances of finding yourself alone with a murderer were slight) and mark the compartments with a red stripe so they could be avoided. Some reforming of the SR 4EPBs was done so that as few units as possible were restricted to peak hour working (these thus had two compartment carriages).

All the AM2s on the LTS also had closed compartments, which were marked in the same way but couldn't be restricted to peak hours only as there were too many of them. It was a short term measure as both types were already in the middle of refurbishment programmes which removed the compartments.

303s were the Glasgow Blue trains, all sliding doors and open saloons. Eastern Region compartments were found on 302s, 307s, and some subclasses of 305 and 308.

Imagine the extra delays at stations whilst men who are unaware and confused tourists are made to leave the carriage and walk down the train to the next carriage.

This also sounds unbelievably sexist by discriminating against people for the way they were born, basically the same as having a 'whites only' carriage, and I'm sure that wouldn't go down too well.

Generally women don't sexually abuse men and from some of the ridiculous comments posted on this thread I don't think I'm going to cease posting on here again. Enjoy living in the stone age

You raise a good point on the transgendered issue of they bring in Women Only carraiges