The question with which I am dealing in this part of my blog is whether the events of Friday 10th June 2011 at Woking give rise to any questions of law. What we are dealing with here is a situation in which passengers had to decamp on to the permanent way after being trapped in stationery trains for five hours or so due to a theft of signal cables. Apparently they were threatened with arrest by British Transport Police on their arrival at the platforms in Woking.
As I see it the central argument here is the question of lawful excuses; did they have the proper legal reasons to be on the trains and stations at the time and did they have legal reason to be on the permanent way. The central point that any police officer should have been seeing is that the passengers decamped to save their own lives and the lives of others; they were on the permanent way to prevent further distress or injury to themselves and others. Therefore they had lawful excuse or reason to be on the permanent way. And the other important thing to realise is that if they were all in possession of valid tickets, then they also had lawful and valid reasons to be on or about the railway property.
This is not the first time I have seen the BT Police get their facts mixed up about people's right to be on or about the railway. They have got confused with the fact that it is private property. But if people have permission to be on private property in the first place and you lock them in trains for many hours, they still have lawful excuse to attempt to free themselves and use whatever methodology they have within their powers to get to safety.
So it behoves the BT Police in the future to ask themselves what are the real reasons why things are happening and not to seek to arrest people on grounds which dont really hold water.
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