HOW right you are! Anyone who uses the North London line will surely agree unreservedly with Gazette Opinion - it s guards patrolling the train that passengers want. Exactly so, because that s precisely what the guards do not and cannot do at present...

HOW right you are! Anyone who uses the North London line will surely agree unreservedly with Gazette Opinion - it's guards patrolling the train that passengers want. Exactly so, because that's precisely what the guards do not and cannot do at present. They are instead isolated from their passengers, shut away in their separate driver/guard compartment at the back of each train, deliberately locked from inside to protect the security of the train from the benefit of its passengers!

Transport for London, and their new operator, will in point of fact be doing just as you say - "most passengers want someone with responsibility for their safety and protection available during the journey" - and just as you rightly say passengers want - "it's time rail operators started listening to what their passengers want for a change".

Redeployed guards doing a bit more than merely releasing and locking door mechanisms at stations will be able to move along the trains throughout the journey, leaving the doors to the driver as on the Underground and on most parts of the overground in London and the South-East with the notable exception of Silverlink.

We can all safely ignore the wilfully misleading bluster from the Scargill-esque NUM-on-wheels, the Luddites of the RMT, interested only in perverting what passengers say they want for the sake of protecting the feather-bedded practices of their own closed shop.

D. Mitchell, Dynevor Road,

Stoke Newington.