BEACHCOMBER

101 YEARS OLD AND STILL BEWILDERED BY TRAINS...

TURMOIL on our railway networks has, I am sad to say, become a feature of everyday life. On Monday I squeezed onto an extremely packed train and heard an announcement apologising for the congestion. The train, it explained, had been reduced from 12 carriages to four because they had lost the other eight. The announcer said that he had phoned his control an hour ago to try to locate the missing carriages but had yet to receive an answer.

For safety reasons, he said, the train would now go direct to King’s Cross without stopping at intervening stations. Extreme overcrowding, he said, is not permissible. I took a glimmer of comfort from the knowledge that I was participating in an illicit activity but that thought did not distract from the discomfort.

Yesterday, it was different. The train was not packed with desperate overcrowded commuters but took about 15 minutes longer than scheduled to reach London, having stopped, for unknown reasons, at several red lights and having to crawl through an area of speed restriction imposed because the track was unsafe.

Were the speed restriction and red lights imposed, I wondered, because they had at last found the previous day’s missing eight carriages which were now romping out of control along the tracks posing a potential hazard to other traffic? Sadly, I could not put this question to anyone on arrival because I had to rush as I was 15 minutes late.

Casting my mind back a couple of months, I remembered the new timetables they had tried to introduce. Unfortunately, that was a complete shambles resulting in wholesale cancellations and delays which have continued ever since.

Why, I have often wondered since then, did someone in authority not say, “Well that’s been a total disaster, let’s go back to the old timetables until we’ve sorted it out.” The old service, after all, was not nearly as bad as the muddle we are now putting up with.

Instead, some bright spark must have said something like this: “I say, chaps, I know how to fix this. Let’s cancel half the trains, including almost all the new routes, cut the other trains in half so we have twice as many, and get them to stop at all the stations the new trains would have stopped at, as well as the ones they used to stop at anyway. That way, people who want to avail themselves of the new services can do so using the old services, or at least would be able to do so if we had enough drivers to operate the halflength trains, which, of course, we don’t, so we’ll have to cancel them.

“Meanwhile – and please keep this under your hats, for it is my masterstroke – let’s have a ghost train of eight carriages, hurtling through the network, ready to pick up passengers at short notice from any station at which they may find themselves without a train. Though the ghost train won’t have a driver, because none of the drivers know where it is and even if they did they couldn’t get there as their trains have been cancelled.”

Please Mr Fat Controller, can we have our old timetable back?