Widow angry after being told to take foot off train seat

Jul 9 2009 by Lyndsay Young, Crosby Herald

A DISABLED widow was so shaken after being told to take her foot off a train seat that she ended up in hospital.

Great-grandmother Kathleen Coventry was left shocked after an enforcement officer “rudely” ordered her to take her bandaged, fractured foot off the seat.

The 79-year-old Litherland pensioner suffers from arthritis as well as osteoporosis and had her foot resting on the seat on the 6.13 Southport-Hunts Cross train because it was too painful to put on the floor.

When she explained her condition to the officer, he said Merseyrail could not have different rules for different people.

Gobsmacked at how “rudely” she was treated, Kathleen has made an official complaint.

Kathleen said: “I just couldn’t bear the pain of it. It was terrible. I couldn’t believe that man was so rude when I was so ill.

“It stunned me to think that he could be so nasty to me. It was appalling, the way I was treated.”

When she asked for the officer’s name he refused but gave his identification number.

Kathleen, who celebrated her 79th birthday in June, was told by doctors to rest her foot but had popped in to Marks and Spencer next to Southport station last Monday (June 29) to spend her birthday vouchers.

She said: “The service I got there was so different. It is second to none.”

Kathleen, who has high blood pressure was so upset by the train incident she was taken to hospital the next morning for blood pressure checks.

Although she agrees with the by-law, which can lead to a caution or prosecution, she believes it should exclude disabled people.

She said: “There are yobbos who just vandalise trains but you could see my walking stick and my bandages. I would have liked for him to have approached me to ask why I had my foot rested on the seat.”

A Merseyrail spokesman could not comment on the case but said officers are not medically trained to determine the condition of passengers and said: “We would want anybody talking to passengers to be polite to people but that is not to say that our member of staff wasn’t.

“She was not cautioned, so there will be no prosecution. But if she feels she has been unfairly treated and she has contacted us, we will make a judgment on whether she has got a case.”