The more I travel on the squalid, run-down, gimcrack, unreliable, privately owned trains we have now, with their filthy toilets and windows you can't open in the heat and penny-pinching knee-room, the more I look back with admiration at the nationalised days of British Railways, which seem a haven of democratic comfort, dignity and respect for the passenger.There may be an element of hyperbole here, in both directions, but I'm with Philip Pullman (though not with everything else he says in the same piece). But I'm not proposing a general discussion of transport matters. I just want to take the opportunity to air a personal gripe about the new-fangled toilets on Virgin trains.
The idea of using the more advanced technology is to improve things. Has it? (1) Before, there used to be a door with a handle. It nearly always worked. Now, with the fancy push-button thingie, it sometimes doesn't. You can arrive to find the door taped over, with an 'out of order' sign. Jeez, it's a door. The technology for one of these that always works is ancient. (2) The new toilets have a strange and lingeringly unpleasant smell. (3) There's often a trickle across the floor or a small lake. (4) The button for flushing the loo is situated behind the seat cover and so not readily accessible; you have first to lower the seat cover (and the seat itself if you're of the standing-up-to-pee part of the population). It's just an idiotic design feature. (5) To wash your hands you have to induce a flow of water by jiggling them about under the opening where the water is supposed to come out. Sometimes water does come out when you do that, but other times it doesn't. This is especially dismaying when, in touching the loo seat to replace it and get at the flushing-button, you find you have touched some wetness there - someone else's - and can't be sure what it is. (6) Even when you are lucky enough to strike water of the cleansing kind by jiggling your hands about, you can find that the drying mechanism, which is operated in a similar way and is inferior to the old-fashioned TOWEL (whether cloth or paper), also doesn't work. There's no hot air where there should be.
In this domain I am a reactionary. Bring back the old, I say. (Sorry, it wasn't very elevated. But I refuse to be silenced.)
