If train staff are heroic, why are our railways a national disgrace?
Somebody pl e ase explain this, because it makes no sense: an offpeak rail ticket from bristol t o London costs more than a one-way flight on a budget airline to half the capitals in europe. It’s cheaper to go to Prague than Paddington.
And while the air operators take excessive measures to ensure safety, even making forced landings if a boozy passenger gets too rowdy, the train companies are not so much blase as reckless.
Anyone who has been stuck on a train after a football match knows that the station staff will let pretty much anyone stagger on, however drunk — then serve them alcohol at the buffet.
At busy times, it isn’t unusual for commuters to find themselves, not just standing up but kettled into the gangways like lemmings, while hurtling at 125mph along infrastructure so ancient that parts of it date back to the Victorian era.
We don’t complain, because we’re british. We’ll have a mutter, but there is no outpouring of rage at this national disgrace.
And the most shocking thing is that we must keep paying a fortune to be herded, delayed, made to stand and deprived of information, before we end up at Swindon in a queue for a ‘ replacement bus service’ in the pouring rain two hours later.
There’s a ripsnorting documentary to be made about the miserable state of british railways, and The Railway: First Great Western (C5) did everything possible not to be that documentary.
Instead, the film-makers treated the railway staff as national heroes, somewhere between special forces and the fourth emergency service. They were keeping the country moving, against impossible odds, with saintly dedication.
No single Great Western employee is to blame for the misery of countless millions of travellers every year, it’s true — not even the person responsible for the ham sandwiches.
but if it’s heroes you want, look to the lifeboat crews and the mountain rescue teams —not the owner of that indifferent voice on the Tannoy who announces that the train from Swansea will be an hour late because the driver’s on his lunch break.
Last week’s episode was much better, because the crews were battling to cope with appalling weather that was tearing their railway apart. The dogged response of the engineers after a storm washed away part of the track at dawlish in devon was admirable. It is astonishing that normal service was resumed so quickly.
but normal rail service isn’t very impressive, especially compared to the outstanding train networks in Japan, France and the U.S. This programme should have been ques- tioning why chaos is commonplace on our railways . . . and why we put up with it so meekly.
A proper british heroine, in a quiet way, was trying to impose order on the organised chaos of London’s busiest shopping district, in Oxford Street Revealed (bbC1), a daytime documentary series running all this week and next. Constable Karen Spencer’s beat was choked with crowds of tourists and shoppers, not to mention buskers, vagrants and dodgy traders thronging the street. She told the pedal-cab drivers to get their wheels off the pavement, she told a beggar faking a disability to sling his hook, and she did it all with good humour.
Just as it seemed that PC Spencer would have a better chance of mopping up the Thames with a bath sponge, she showed that the old-fashioned copper can still make a difference. Two 15year-old girls were caught shoplifting by security guards in a fashion store: a talking-to from the law was exactly what they needed.
There’s nothing witty, flashy or surprising about this series. but it is methodical, and we saw every stage of the process, as the shoplifters were dealt with. by the time PC Spencer had arrested the girls and read them their rights, they were heartily sorry.
After they’d spent a couple of hours in the cells, and been interviewed and fingerprinted in front of their parents, they were more embarrassed than ever in their lives. This was policing at its most mundane but also most effective. It’s good to know some things still work in this country.