Southern Trains - The Way Forward?

think you might just find that the driver has better things to do than bring the train to an unscheduled halt, then go back and do the guard's job.
(Presumably for no extra pay).

We had Guards on trains because the driver had better things to do...

Rule 126
check coal, fire irons tools
arrange the fire and prevent excessive smoke emission / blowing of safety valves
refrain from throwing fire
observe signal boxes

Rule 127
He had to look for oil lit signals around a large boiler
take water
supervise his Fireman

I could continue the list... Now we have given him a cushioned seat / warm cab etc. and as far as I understand we have increased the pay (at least compared with other professions?) so this leaves him with plenty of time to take on the Guards duties, with the help of modern technology!

If a Guard is checking tickets he is not keeping a good look out, If he can't pass through the train his ability to dispense assistance to passengers is very low.

While it would be nice to have a second customer service assistant on train it costs money... can we afford it? 7 dragging incidents in 10 years... with DOO so how many trains? how many stops? How many people? sounds low risk to me. Oh and with the Guard we still have dragging incidents.

As for longer trains needing a guard, we still have the problem that it is one pair of eyes. Ever try setting up a relay of staff on two sided or curved platforms for train dispatch? How effective is it? One member of station staff gives the right away, one Guard gives the signal to the driver, one Driver opens the regulator... I could understand the point of the Guard if he had access to the brake as in old stock, but not now.

The Guard is just the latest in a very long line of Railway professionals to find their job has ceased to exist.

Isn't it time that the specific issues are recorded and examined by a working group of managers and union reps and solutions found.

I've never set it up, but I have observed it in action many times at stations like Bristol Temple Meads. Each member of staff is position in a place where they can clearly see a portion of the train and be seen by the person closest to the guard's position. That member of staff observes that the other platform staff are indicating it is safe to depart, they can see their portion of the train is safe, so they give the signal to the guard who confirms what they can see is safe to depart and gives the RA to the driver, who checks any relevant signals and that there is nothing else preventing a safe departure, and departs. I'm not aware of any issues having occurred with this method of working.

Yes I got them around the wrong way, thanks for correcting. But the rest of my comments support them being the wrong way around. So can we call it an editing error please  

The 10v30 years was a memory fail, apologies.

FWIW I've witnessed three people trapped in doors, 2 on the same underground journey a number of years ago where the Driver clearly wasn't bothered and just pressed the button after a set time. The other on Thames Train, all DOO.

So I would expect there to be more incidents on DOO, but how many of these lead to non-trivial injuries up to death. I suspect it is very, very few and would expect any rational cost-benefit analysis to clearly support DOO.

The main paper you want is RSSB's T1035, available for download as a PDF.
There are others, like T535 dealing with a request to increase the number of multiplexed images that can be safely displayed on in-cab monitors in order to avoid overloading the driver's attention and dealing with reduced resolution.
T1035 acknowledges that the very best techniques, procedures and technologies will only result in DOO being safety-neutral to guard dispatch. It also uncovers little gems like the recommendation being based on site surveys of only 8 stations across the network etc. and says that the savings over 20 years are likely to be £2.1bn IF there is an immediate network wide programme of guard redundancies.

Emergency stops? On NR? Where 10 seconds late to the platform can mean a 60 minute wait or more?

Another point, and I'm sorry it's not a technical one, is whether withdrawing guards from trains is also inadvertently discriminating against less-able bodied passengers, not to mention those with visual and hearing impairments.

Of course, for the vast majority of the time, they may not need assistance, nor even seek nor welcome it.

But, if the schedule goes pear-shaped, and because of the nature of its' routes, Southern is particularly vulnerable to the railway equivalent of a butterfly fainting in Venezula causing an earthquake in Patagonia ie chaos theory, it might just pay the franchise-holder to have a presence there just in case it's needed.

Because it ain't just about safety in the public service-it also ought to be about the comfort and convenience of your passengers/customers, as far as you can assist in that.

Two staff on a train carrying 1,500 people seems like a good idea to me. I don't mind too much what the duties of the second person are and I'm happy for the driver to use body-side cameras for door closing such that guard becomes on board supervisor OBS. How many of the PTI  accidents and near misses are with body-side cameras?

The one sticking point I can see is that if the OBS is not available during disruption and the train leaves without one, what provision is made for wheelchair users at unstaffed stations? RMT have recently latched onto this issue which strikes me as shabby opportunism. If the strike is ultimately about this only, then surely there is a way to solve this problem without a strike. 

They're heated

Normally it is cheaper to run DOO, but in this case guards becoming OBSs are staying at the same pay, which is why it is expected that the OBSs will be gone at the start of the next franchise. Indeed the RSSB report on DOO talks about how they can make savings if they fire all the guards immediately.

There is also a suspicion that this is, in part, the government looking for a punch up with the unions but we don't do politics here

One of the key advantages of Driver door operation (strictly speaking this doesn't preclude a 'guard' doing other duties) is that platform dispatch can be much quicker. I have often noticed that even at smaller, less busy stations the guard has to look up and down, perhaps blow the whistle, close the doors other than their door, look up and down again, perhaps from the platform where it is curved, get back on, close their door and give the starting signal. All this can take as long as an entire station dwell on a DOO route. This matters in capacity terms.

For example take Earlsfield on SWT (not currently planned to change to DOO as far as I'm aware. A rough check of real time trains shows that there are 18 trains per hour towards Waterloo on platform 2. This corresponds to an average headway of 200 seconds. Say that the DOO changes the dispatch process reduces each 60 second dwell by 15 seconds. That is more than a whole headway saved per hour and thus an additional train could operate per hour. The capacity (and / or reliability improvement) this would add on constrained, 600 - 1000 passengers on very busy routes into London (including for longer distance services) is very valuable.

They do have to do these things, but the equipment necessary is laid out in front of them (or adjacent to their cab in the case of platform monitors or mirrors). They can press the door buttons while looking constantly at the monitors to check the PTI. It is observation of both practices that has indicated to me that driver dispatch is significantly quicker. In particular the absence of the need for two separate door closures (with the guards door being closed separately is a straight forward saving. There are few intensive Metro services around the world where the doors are operated by an additional crew member to the driver or operator.

These are only arguments for driver door control, not for removing the second crew member from the train.

T535 contains research about dwell times and the number of camera images that a driver has to scan. Of course, the guard who might travel in an unused cab on some classes of train, would also have access to the CCTV bank whilst doing that.


---EDIT---
"essential public service workers"

Is it a public service? Or is it privately operated? Where does the line get drawn?