Rail unions have called for more protection for staff and passengers after the mass stabbings attack on an LNER train in Cambridgeshire.
The incident has cast a fresh spotlight on transport safety, after budget cuts affecting police numbers and rail staffing.
While details are still unfolding, the actions of onboard crew appear to have played a significant part in limiting the number and severity of casualties.
The person still in hospital with life-threatening injuries was a LNER staff member, it emerged on Sunday evening. The worker was on the train during the incident and tried to stop the attacker.
British Transport Police said: “Detectives have reviewed the CCTV from the train and it is clear his actions were nothing short of heroic and undoubtedly saved many people’s lives.”
The RMT and TSSA unions were swift to praise rail staff and call for more action. The RMT’s general secretary, Eddie Dempsey, said he would be “seeking urgent meetings with government, rail employers and police to ensure that we have the strongest possible support, resources and robust procedures in place”.
The TSSA’s general secretary, Maryam Eslamdoust, urged LNER and the government “to act swiftly to review security, to support the affected workers, and to ensure nothing like this happens again”.
While the confined carriages of a train heightens any threat, fatal incidents of violence onboard have been almost unknown. The LNER attacks recall the killing of a passenger on a train in Guildford, Surrey, in 2019, which made headlines because of its randomness and rarity.
The kind of airport security that might have located weapons used on the LNER train is a feature of only one railway operator and station in Britain: Eurostar at London St Pancras, where X-ray scanners and security lanes are deemed necessary. The international rail service has about 30 miles of track in the Channel tunnel.
But even a scaled-down version, such as a detector arch, in everyday rail travel would probably prove unworkable, causing more queueing and delay than most passengers would regard as tolerable, and requiring a far bigger investment in infrastructure and people than the cash-strapped rail industry and the Treasury would countenance.
A former chief constable of the British Transport Police was swift to rule it out. “It just isn’t going to happen,” Andy Trotter told LBC radio. But more investment could help, he said: in facial recognition, random searches, and in staff, whether police or railway personnel.
The BTP is funded by the railway, and with fares rising faster than inflation, successive governments have been hoping to make savings across the board. That has involved attempts to cut police budgets, abolish ticket offices, increase driver-only operation and change station staffing, all of which have been resisted by unions.
The overall number of recorded assaults on the railways has risen in recent years: it rose another 7% to an annual high of 10,231 in figures released last week.
However, the headline numbers from the Office of Rail and Road include far greater recording of harassment or common assault, which can include threatening behaviour. This makes up 80% of the total count. In context, there were more than 1.7bn passenger journeys on the UK railway last year.
Nonetheless, rail staff have reported widespread fear of attack. A 2024 report by the Rail Safety and Standards Board said 2,793 rail workers had been either injured or traumatised by assault or abuse in the previous year. In a TSSA online survey of hundreds of its members, 40% reported incidents involving weapons.
Eslamdoust said: “Safety and staffing go hand in hand. You cannot talk about safety while cutting back on the very people who keep others safe.”
