Glenfinnan’s poo plea to Jacobite steam train bosses

A plea has been issued this week to the operator of the Jacobite steam train to halt extended stops at Glenfinnan Station due to continuing issues with human waste being emptied from the train toilets onto the track bed.

At this month’s meeting of Glenfinnan Community Council, Hege Hernes, who manages Glenfinnan Station Museum on the West Highland Line, confirmed the Jacobite was once again stopping to allow passengers to visit the station.

She also revealed human excrement was still being dumped on the line, despite, she said, Network Rail paying for carriages to have retention tanks fitted. These were not being used, she added, because there was not the capacity in Fort William to empty them.

Ms Hernes asked the community council to write to Jacobite operator West Coast Railways (WCR) to complain and Highland councillor Denis Rixson requested the complaint be copied to Highland Council’s environmental health team.

Asked what was happening regards the emptying of toilets on board the Jacobite, made famous in the Harry Potter movies as the Hogwarts Express, a West Coast Railways spokesman told the Lochaber Times this week: ‘Our engineering staff worked hard last winter to modernise our carriages and but for Covid would have fitted retention tanks to them all by this summer.

‘However, we are confident all the work will be completed well in advance of the deadline for fitment of 2023. Until then, very conscious of local people’s concerns, our staff ensure all loos are locked and cannot be used while the Jacobite is in any of the stations along the route.

‘Unfortunately, the lavatories at Glenfinnan have been out of action this summer. And on one occasion when the Jacobite was stranded there for two hours, as the Station Museum, which is responsible for the station loos, decided not to open them, we had no alternative but to unlock those on the train because we have a primary duty of care for the well-being of our passengers, who included elderly people and young children. However, that was an isolated incident.’

In March last year, WCR suspended the stopping of trains in Glenfinnan due to Covid concerns and that suspension remained in force until the first week of this month. Since then, the two daily steam trains stop for 25 minutes at Glenfinnan Station, allowing hundreds of passengers to disembark.

The Lochaber Times has seen photographic evidence of human excrement and used toilet paper littering the track at the station.

Responding to the comments from WCR, Ms Hernes, also secretary of the West Highland Line Community Rail Partnership, said: ‘There are no public toilets at Glenfinnan Station, just like there are no public toilets at Arisaig Station.

‘It would therefore seem inappropriate for trains without retention tanks to have extended stops at these stations during a pandemic.

‘Glenfinnan Station Museum provides toilets for its visitors and traditionally these have also been made available for Jacobite passengers during the train’s extended Glenfinnan stop.

‘However, during the pandemic the museum has been forced to operate with only a skeleton volunteer staff and we are still only able to welcome four visitors at any one time.

‘In this situation, we cannot cope with attending to the needs of hundreds of Jacobite passengers descending on the station. We therefore asked the steam train operators not to allow for an extended stop at Glenfinnan. This worked well until the beginning of July 2021 when the operators decided to disregard our request.

‘This change of procedure has resulted in twice-daily crowds of hundreds of people around Glenfinnan Station and we have been faced with clear evidence that on-train toilets have been in use during this stop, despite the train crews’ best efforts to keep them out of bounds.

‘There is, of course, no central locking system available to them.

‘As a result of the reintroduction of the extended stop, the museum has been forced to deal with large amounts of rubbish deposited in and around the platform waste bins and to open our museum toilet to try to minimise the biohazard of human waste on the station track bed.

‘The work involved is extremely onerous on volunteers with our small educational charity and we fail to understand why our plea to be bypassed cannot continue to be heeded.’

‘We cannot cope with attending to the needs of hundreds of Jacobite passengers descending on the station.’

Photograph: Iain Ferguson, The Write Image. The Jacobite steam train draws tens of thousands of visitors each year to Glenfinnan to see it cross the famous viaduct.