Northern said it will not tolerate verbal and physical abuse towards staff on the railway and will take action against anyone who threatens their employees’ safety.

While the company said that an ‘overwhelming majority’ of people who travel are polite and respectful, a very small minority has resorted to shouting, spitting and attacking members of staff in recent years.

The impact of abuse ‘absolutely affects’ morale in depots across the north according to Gail Torrence, head of stations and trains in the region.

“The attitude of staff can go from being extremely positive and engaged to negative because they're obviously concerned about coming into work,” said Gail.

“It is easy to read statistics about verbal and physical assaults but this happens to real people.

“People who, outside of work, have families, friends, lives to lead, and should never be subject to any sort of abuse.

“It's just easy for someone who's on a train or on a station, who's angry, who's stressed out, who's under the influence, to see a member of staff in uniform and just take out their frustrations or feelings on them.

“It's not always necessarily a personal thing about that member of staff, they simply see a northern uniform and unfortunately verbally or physically assault that individual.”

Maryport has been identified as a particular hotspot station for abuse and a scheme has been rolled out to play classical music at the station to help bring down levels of anti-social behaviour.

“All areas across the network have their own particular hotspot locations, but we are absolutely focusing on those locations,” said Gail.

“Maryport is a significant one and we now run dry trains on a Saturday night now from Carlisle to try and reduce the instances of verbal and physical assaults on our staff.

“So anywhere that we're aware that there is an issue, we are doing what we can, putting additional measures in place to try and reduce the number of assaults that happen.”

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The train operator says the chance of perpetrators being caught on camera is now much higher after it added a further 600 new CCTV cameras to the more than 1,000 that monitor its station estate.