Would you report a 12 year old unattended on a train?

[GloGirl]

If you saw two 12 year olds on a train without a grown up would you report it?

"Any adults who saw two 12-year-olds getting off a train on their own should have questioned that."

YABU - call the police!
YANBU - no, I wouldn't

BBC News - Missing Balloch schoolgirls spent night locked inside train
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-56476935

Really weird story.

kids this age get on the train without paying all the time

Not unusual here for kids to travel to school by train. So no, I wouldn't have noticed. But even here in London some trains are very quiet at the moment, especially outside normal commuting times. It wouldn't be that unusual to be the only person in the carriage, so maybe not a lot .of people around.

On a longer journey I would probably engage in conversation to casually find out where they were going, and then see what happened at the other end.

If I had placed my 12 year old daughter on a longer train journey then I would also prime them not to answer any questions like this. If the questioner was being pushy about finding who was meeting them etc I would encourage them to move seats to another carriage and possibly alert the conductor.

Brilliant, looks to me like they are a pair of right wee chancers and that mammy can't see it.

Kids are bored kids jump on a train for a laugh parents have no clue where they are parents then blames the everyone else ! No I. Wouldn't report kids on a train.

Sleepover in lockdown? The parents should know better. Serves the girls right

there is a whole cadre of people on here for whom The Lives of Others is a wet dream.

Also, if they made it to a major station there will be transport police and station staff around. They spoke to staff so there were in this case.

My DD had her purse/phone/ticket taken whilst out and the transport police contacted me. They put her on the train and I collected her the other end.
Teach your children to ask for help.

Doesn’t sound like these two wanted to be caught out (and told off for) messing around on the trains.
Had they spoken up when they were at the station it would have saved everyone a lot of wasted time, effort and worry.

@Tibtom

On a longer journey I would probably engage in conversation to casually find out where they were going, and then see what happened at the other end.

If I had placed my 12 year old daughter on a longer train journey then I would also prime them not to answer any questions like this. If the questioner was being pushy about finding who was meeting them etc I would encourage them to move seats to another carriage and possibly alert the conductor.

That's fair enough, I understand that. As I said, what I would do now has been altered by actually being in a situation where I engaged with two boys who revealed they needed help and their parents were really relieved and grateful. So you also need to advise your children what to do if things go wrong and they are not to speak to adults. As a regular train traveller, believe me finding the train manager isn't always that easy!

They probably won't do it again or remember to get off earlier.

I would not report 12 year olds, as secondary school children are normally expected to travel to and from school alone, and many travel some distances by train, etc.
However, I am surprised they were not noticed by the driver.
Example. Our station has a siding, and some trains terminate there, and remain in the siding, for hours, or sometimes overnight.
However, the driver walks through the train at the station, and locks the doors as he goes, to ensure there is no one left on the train. On one occassion a lady left her bag on the train, but had to wait at the station, while the driver located it.
Normally, if the train is terminating there, and say, someone is asleep and misses the anouncement, then anyone else in the carriage would wake them up, but that is just a courtesy, and relies on there being someone else in the carriage. It is actually the driver doing the walkthrough that would find anyone.

Two posts from the RailUK Forum:

The North Clyde lines between Glasgow and Balloch/Helensburgh are over run with young kids at the moment, it's an absolute nightmare with kids riding trains all night, causing trouble, vandalising units, indeed there have been a significant number of BTP operations lately to try to curb it. NO ONE is going to question 2 12 year olds. There's loads of kids about. At the end of the day they shouldn't have been on the train, they didn't have tickets, they had 2 phones but the wrong charger?, the parents had no idea where they were and there are big, clearly marked emergency egress handles at each door. It's not hard to get out a 334. I suspect they have been drinking and ended up in a deep sleep across a seat. It's certainly common at the moment, even at that age.

and

The vast majority of people that use north Clyde services at this point in time are either junkies, alkies or kids so the idea that seeing two twelve year olds on a train is somewhat out of the ordinary is fanciful at best.
334s have internal cctv that will be downloaded and will tell exactly what’s happened between the train arriving at Helensburgh on Friday night and the children being found on Saturday morning.

Having driven these services for ten years and seeing the behaviour of the children that frequent these services I would bet they’ve known exactly what they were doing and the families will now try to play the “victim card” rather than look at why their children were out roaming the rail network during a global pandemic.

Don't believe their story about falling asleep.
They got a train to Glasgow without a ticket. They then couldn't get back on a train to Balloch without a ticket so had to wait around. They then boarded a train which was going to Helensburgh. They say they fell asleep and didn't get off at Dumbarton. They then woke up to find themselves trapped in the train.
Yeah right.

First of all I don't believe both of them could fall asleep that easily.
Secondly I don't believe that other passengers getting off at Helensburgh would walk past them and not wake them up if they were asleep. I've woken people up at the terminus before.
Thirdly, I find it very odd that a member of staff did not walk through the train to check before locking it for the night. I thought this was standard practice. If they didn't do this then they were remiss.

However, I think that the girls probably hid somewhere before the train arrived in Helensburgh for a bit of a laugh not realizing that they would end up locked in or perhaps not caring about getting locked in as it would be an adventure to sleep overnight in the train.

They've cooked up a bit of a story to make it look less bad for the benefit of their parents and now the mother is blaming passers-by.
I wouldn't approach a couple of 12 year olds getting off a train. They were probably laughing and joking without a care in the world. It's normal for 12 year olds to get trains alone.
I'd only approach a child of that age if they were visibly distressed or looked lost.
I once intervened in a MacDonalds when a drunk was hassling two kids of about 11 and threatening to follow them home. I walked with them to their bus stop and made sure they got on their bus (drunk had disappeared by then). The children were distressed about the whole thing.

But a couple of 12 year olds in a good mood - no.

I don't think Balloch has a ticket office .so it's probably easy for the children to jump on a train for something to do,

BlokeHereInPeace

The newspapers need to run this as a story to balance things out.
Makes me so angry.

Police officers were assaulted at our train station they had questioned teens trying to jump the barriers, this must be a trend that's caught on !

@BlokeHereInPeace. Yeah those comments tally with what I’ve heard locally. The train stations round here are open without tickets barriers so it’s easy for kids to jump on and off trains without paying. They’ve think it’s a fun thing to do in the evening and the trains are full of them. No one will intervene with two particular kids. Would love it if ScotRail came back with clarification of what the cctv shows as I doubt it will show the girls story will hold up.

I think I would expect a guard to check a train at the end of its service before it gets locked and everything turned off. But I would never notice anything out of the ordinary about 12yos on a train unaccompanied. The mother is bonkers.

To be fair to the mother, she has specifically said the girls shouldn’t have done it, but kids often do silly things, so it doesn’t sound like she is excusing her daughter’s part in what happened. She’s just saying they should have checked the train thoroughly before locking it up. I imagine she probably got the fright of her life, waiting up all night for her daughter to come home. You would think the absolute worst.

Two 12 year olds with no phone between them ?

Aye snookie

I would not be one but surprised to see that the cctv told a different story.

I have no doubt the man had a shot night of worry.

But to expect others to challenge/question/be responsible for her child?

Where is her responsibility? Is her kid taking responsibility?

I have more sympathy for the crew.

As a passenger I got threatened to be mutilated(face and nethers) last week by someone’s little ‘out being silly’ darling.

The little darlings in this case will be covering their ‘silly’ little arses.

One bit not one but.

My daughter has been on a train several times with friends since about 11. No ones fault but the kids for being idiots.

I wouldn't at all, especially two kids together. 12 year olds aren't babies, they can get from A to B on a train FFS!

Someone did say to DD1 on one of her first trips to the shops unaccompanied by an adult in Y7 (I dropped her and her friend off in local town and collected them again afterwards) "Are you old enough to go around by yourself?" But she was quite petite (4'10") and looked younger. No chance of that with DD2, she's currently in Y7 and is 5'7"!

But no, even if they looked a bit younger I'd probably think they were just small for their age. Some of them going off to secondary school do look really young.