Well this puts the carriage into miscarriage of justice.
A train service bound from London’s Blackfriars station has been cited as the capital’s most violent late night commuter service, with no less than 23 known crimes committed on it in the last year alone.
The 1.04am Saturday morning train for Bedford recorded 23 crimes in 2015, including theft, sexual assault and battery, resulting in five arrests and two convictions.
Operated by Thameslink, the figure - revealed in a Freedom of Information request to British Transport Police - give a damning insight into the trouble that blights night owl services across the city, where weary and stressed commuters regularly mix with tanked up partygoers on creaking rail networks.
Focusing on the nine busiest commuter routes running to the Home Counties from London between midnight and 4am, the report also found that eight crimes were reported on services from King’s Cross to Peterborough, and Victoria to Brighton, while seven offenses took place on Paddington to Oxford trains and five on the Waterloo to Guildford line.
There were no reported crimes on the Marylebone to Aylesbury service during the same period and one on the Victoria to Maidstone East line. So if you're one of the regular passengers, well done you.
Speaking to the Daily Star, which called the services 'vomit comets', Richard Fuller, Tory MP for Bedford and Kempston who uses the Thameslink Blackfriars line and labelled the results as “shocking”, offered this explanation:
"People can have a good time but when you have a good time you should realise there are people on the train who want to sleep, maybe they worked a night shift; maybe their work is stressful."
Conversely, a Thameslink spokeswoman suggested that the figures aren’t perhaps as alarming as they should be: “These statistics of 23 crimes in one year have to be seen in the context of the 52,000 passengers we carried between Blackfriars and Bedford in the early hours of Friday night in that same period.”
Have you ever felt unsafe on a late-night London train? Let us know below.
