On the ninth day of Chrimbo…

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

Britain's rail operators justifying yet another eye-watering rise in fares by pointing at all the investment in new rolling stock.

More from the Observer's Book...

A few more from The Observer's Book of Commuters...


The Tiller Girls: Genetically incapable of not walking four abreast along any pavement, station platform or canal towpath. Usually accompanied by raucous laughter, the handbags from hell and an overpowering smell of yesterday's face powder.

Trolley Dollies: Gentlemen of a certain age with suits of a similar vintage pulling along little cases on wheels with neither flair nor accuracy. Imagine Bernard Manning impersonating a BOAC air stewardess and you'd not be far wrong.

Franklin's Lost: They couldn't find the Northwest Passage and by God, they're not going to be finding their bus any time soon. In between times they meander aimlessly sadly between bus stops, driven mad by snow-borne mirages.

From the Observer's Book

Now that The Small Object of Desire has been and got herself a new job I'm back on the public transport commute. I'd forgotten what a trial my fellow commuters are…

The Power Walker: Usually dressed like an extra from the touring production of"Bonfire of the Vanities," they're determined to stride out in a ruthlessly straight line, taking no prisoners in the battle for that stretch of pavement.

The Hypnotised Diagonalists: Earphones glued in to keep out the world, eyes fixed on the mobile device in their hand as they walk straight across you without warning as you try to cross that busy road where the pedestrian crossing's been out of action since last Summer.

Mrs. Overalls: Usually men, Mrs. Overalls dither about in shop doorways, train doorways, tram doorways, in fact any narrow passageway you may need to get through in a hurry. Their motto is: "I'm not actually going anywhere, and by God! neither are you."

The Metropolitan Cyclist: Expensive bike, speedos, hi-vis spectacles and streamlined cycling helmet, the Metropolitan Cyclist has the spatial awareness Ida seven-year-old and the arrogance of a ham actor playing a Spanish grandee in a remake of "Zorro."

TrishanEm: Two or three women functioning as one loud series of announcements about the sexual inadequacies of friends' boyfriends; bulletins about the doings of That Bitch; and Daily Mail headlines. Usually looking like the Black & White Minstrel Show had run out of burnt cork and had to resort to gravy browning.

Rubbing shoulders with the stars

I bumped into Eugene Pallette on the tram this afternoon. He was passing himself off as a matron from Crumpsall but the voice was a dead giveaway.

Drums along the Mersey

Visitors to our fair city are beguiled by the romance of the place names on our public transport systems. They marvel at the merest thought of St. Wereburglar, the patron saint of those who are law-abiding enough save under the influence of the full moon. They crowd over to MediaCit Yuk, the gleaming chromium-and-neon spires where once there were the skinners' yards, hoping to catch a glimpse of Simon Dee or even Michael Miles. And talk of Robert Shaw's Mumps makes young men quiver.

The trams are coming to Helminthdale. Sing calloo! calloo! callay!

Thursday singalong

Learning with father

Overheard on the tram:

"Daddy, what's that blue light for?"

"That shows when there's an emergency."

"What's the green light for?"

"That's an ejector seat."

"Oh. Then what's that red light for?"

"When that's on you can talk to the driver and he'll tell you off for pressing that big red button on the door."

"What happens if you press it and ask him for sweeties?"

"He tells you to fuck off."

Hello hello

For some time now my local railway station has been kitted out not just with new tannoys but also induction loops for hearing-impaired people. Presumably this latter is to fulfil obligations under the disability acts. Neither seems knowingly attached to anything and we certainly don't get any announcements but it's good to know that we have an equality of access to no information about our train services.

Probably nothing that couldn't be cured by a kind word from a beautiful woman

The train into work got stuck at signals awhile. I'd been staring at something on the embankment for a good five minutes before I realised what it was. It was an elm sapling. I can't remember when I last saw an English elm. When I was a kid the main road was an avenue of old elms, green and sticky with sap in the July sunlight.

I do miss elms.

On the way back home I got the bus to Manchester. I was followed onto the bus by an epicene figure in a white safari jacket. I wondered if he was Death. I chose not to ask.

A few stops down, a pink Mazda cut up the bus. It was the shade of pink I've only ever seen in NHS children's spectacles.

The chip shop further down the street turns out not to have a window blind as I'd imagined. It's a sheet of brushed vinyl pop art wallpaper in faded bullseye pattern.

A gaggle of young girls get on, gaudy in thickly-applied make-up, each with a mobile 'phone clamped to one ear. In my day young ladies were quieter and more demure weren't they? No, of course not. I remember a Sicilian hillside raucous in bawdy song. One of the girls bawled down the 'phone that they were "going lindyhopping." I expect it means something different these days, like dance music.

Next come four mockney diamond geezers. "Just three stops to the Chinese, mate. How much? Is that for all of us?" Welcome to the unsubsidised provinces, mate.

No one was sick and nobody died and the driver got out of his cab to help a lady carry her pushchair off the bus.

Going home

It's the little things that affect me. On the bus on the way home there was one of those upsetting little vignettes. The bus stopped outside a MacDonalds and passengers trooped on including a small girl, perhaps eight or nine, with the obligatory MacMeal and drink.

"Sorry love," said the driver, "you can't come on here with that."

She put the goodies into the carrier bag she was holding.

"Not even in that, love. Too many people leave it all behind on the bus so we're not letting anyone come on with them."

One of the other passengers had a go at him - "Aw, come on, man, she's only little" - but he was adamant. The girl turned and walked away. As we passed her she gave the bus a glance I know too well.

I can understand the driver's position. More often than not the buses on this route are middens. I'm not talking about the occasional crisp packet or pop bottle, I'm talking serious past-your-ankles litter. And yet... and yet...

There must be a better way of doing it. She was young enough to be told that the driver wanted to see what she was bringing on and that he'd want to see that she was taking it all away with her. Or something.

I'd like to imagine that when she got home that girl had somebody to tell the story to who'd then give her a hug, tell her it didn't matter and then give her a jam butty and a cup of tea. I'd like to imagine that.

I've got a little list...

Just checking to make sure they're there:

• People who insist on having window seats who then don't look out of the window.
• Newspaper proprietors who are more than happy to tell their readers that Britain Is Broken and the country is broke, safe in their non-domiciled tax status.
• People who put their feet on the seats in trains.
• Those special people who don't have a ticket for the journey they've just made and waste quarter of an hour telling the ticket inspectors that they can't possibly queue up to buy one because they need to meet a friend elsewhere in the station.
• People too busy on their mobile 'phone to tell the coffee stall girl what they actually want to order and too pig ignorant to get out of the sodding way so that the rest of us might be served.
• Anyone who says: "If they don't like the laws of this country they should be sent back where they came from," and spend the rest of the day complaining about having to pay their taxes, conform to Road Traffic Acts and not be able to string up the tabloid demon of the day.
• People who stand in a long queue to get out of the station and wait until they get to the ticket inspector before they start rummaging in their bag to find their travel card.
• People too busy on their mobile 'phone to tell the bus driver either what fare they want to pay or which stop they want to get off at.

I think I'm mellowing with age.

Disturbing on two counts...

My train home was delayed at signals quarter of an hour while we waited for a freight train to get out of the way. The driver had to get out to ring the signal box to get the OK to proceed.

It is the first time in my life that I have ever fancied a train driver...


...she can't have been much more than eighteen. Or else I'm getting old.

Friday matinee

Chuggety chug

I've always had my suspicions that Passenger Focus was a bit closer to the industry than its stated aims might suggest. Its annual statements of the state of the travelling nation's railway experiences have never really chimed with my own, nor with those of anyone I know.

Up until recently the only time I'd ever been surveyed by Passenger Focus was about ten years ago. Mid-afternoon on a nice sunny day travelling on the slow train between Carlisle and Barrow.Which was a pleasant thing to do if you got the chance. I couldn't complain about the journey: it was very agreeable and it was on time. I can't help noticing that these days they've halved the number of journeys on this route and replaced the double-carriaged sprinter with a single carriage so that it doesn't matter what time of day you travel it's going to be standing room only and there's no space for bikes, buggies or wheelchairs. Such is progress.

They did a survey of passengers in Manchester the other week. A lady stood at Victoria Station, a rail terminus, handing out the forms. As hordes of passengers came in on late, badly over-crowded old and rackety trains, or arrived late because the previous train hadn't bothered to stop at their stations so that it could arrive at Victoria in that state of "On Time" that only exists in the minds of Railway Performance Managers, they were handed forms asking them for their opinions on their outward journey. These people had arrived. And Passenger Focus didn't want to know about their inward journey.

I asked the organisation if there was any way that passengers could flag up repeat failures of services. After all, there's a world of difference between a one-off cancellation due to exceptional calamity and a service that's routinely twenty minutes late or cancelled three or four times a week. The answer is no: they "want the train operator to have the opportunity to resolve the complaint first." "Resolve the complaint" in this context is "send a stock reply within a week or two of the complaint." So long as you get your fob off in the alloted time all is well with the world.

As you stand, crushed nose-to-armpit, hurtling through Suburbia at a steady two miles an hour in a rusty old egg crate that should have been mothballed permanently a decade ago, it's good to know that somebody, somewhere doesn't give a flying fuck.

The shock of self-awareness

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, in her pomp, declared that any man over the age of thirty who was still relying on bus services was a loser.

Belatedly I am come to the conclusion that the bitch was right after all.

Hypocritical fat fuck

Must have been somebody else who was Secretary of State for Transport for all those years and did jack all except pour gallons of gelt down the rapacious maws of an endless procession of consultants, bean-counters and regulators.

Public Transport at its best

We've been having a moan about the state of the public transport systems lately so let us consider The Runaway Bus. A paradoxical film as it doesn't include a runaway bus. At all. At no point in the proceedings does the bus run away. Indeed, it doesn't often reach brisk walking pace. It is so good to see verisimilitude on the silver screen.

The film is written, produced and directed by Val Guest. I don't subscribe to the auteur doctrine, never have, never will. This is as close as I get: one of the great British directors doing a splendid job of giving us a light bit of fluff with which to while away the time. And jolly good, too. I expect Mrs. P. spent most of the production scrouging gaspers off John Horsley.

The basic premise of the film is that passengers are stranded at London Airport (Heathrow) by one of those fogs we don't get any more. A daunting display of Margaret Rutherford, complete with combat umbrella, results in a small group being put onto Relief Bus 13, driven by Percy Lamb (Frankie Howerd in his first starring rôle). They are to motor over to Blackbush Airport ("you can't miss it, it's just off the Southampton Road"), where the fog has lifted and planes can take off for Dublin.

The business with Howerd trying to find his way about in the fog, aided only by a box of matches and a duff set of directions given over the 'phone in the security box is arguably the only piece of pure Frankie Howerd that ever made it to screen (cue boozy arguments about "Up Pompeii"). While we're there, give a wave of the hand to Sam Kydd.

What he and we don't know is that a bullion robbery at the airport has resulted in twenty thousand pounds' worth of gold bullion being hidden in the boot of the bus. Imagine our surprise to get a radio message from Inspector Henley (John Horsley looking impossiby young and craggy) telling him of his cargo.

Can our hero save the day and foil The Banker (the mysterious criminal mastermind) armed only with his wits and the winsome charms of Petula Clark in a flight attendant's uniform (sigh..)?

I'm not going to tell you.

Chuffing 'eck

I've started and abandoned a few posts this week; perhaps another time for those, when I'm in a mood where I won't frighten the horses.

Instead, let us consider the railway system. Regular readers (bless you both) will know that I depend on public transport for to get me anywhere more than a couple of miles away. I try not to bore you with it because it bores me silly: time was when you'd go to a station, get a train, get off, job done but that seems like another world of childish enchantment these days. What few trains still stop at our local station are ageing rattlers from the early eighties packed to the ginnels with pissed-off passengers and running late on principle.

It annoys me to see the rail adverts on the telly. The journey from London to Manchester on Virgin is portrayed as a carnival of comfort, ease and romantic discovery. I'm still shouting at the screen a quarter of an hour after the advert's been and gone. If that's not bad enough, there's another one which portrays passengers as sheep: OK it's honest but you'd think that even these days they'd have a bit of shame about it. Mind you, if we were sheep we'd get better conditions of travel.

Like the Post Office, the government's anti-poverty agencies and the House of Commons Fees Office, the railway system Must Make A Profit. Quite why is beyond me. The railway system, like the Post Office, is part of our national infrastructure: it is the stuff that facilitates the profit-making elements of the economy. If you fuck up the infrastructure you fuck up the business, which is why Tesco makes a huge profit with its fleet of new vans and that bloke with a Transit van up on bricks isn't going to cut it in the Logistics Sector (remember when it was 'transport' or 'haulage?')

Strangely enough, the road network isn't required to make a profit, even when road charging is being applied. It would be interesting to apply the same criteria to roads as apply to rail...

One of the reasons why we're down on trains is "lack of demand." The trains still steam through once every half hour, they just don't stop. It would be no great hardship to stop, just three minutes for the on/offs, which is within with the five minutes the train sits at the signals just outside Castlefield waiting for its slot into Manchester. But there's no demand. The Sons of Beeching reckon that outside standard commuting hours there is no need for anybody to use small suburban halts, so by not providing the service they can demonstrate that there's no demand. Furthermore, if there's no demand then perhaps there's a need to wind the station down...

Imagine this thinking being applied to your small suburban roads: how many vehicles per hour do you get down your road? I live on a bus route that's also a rat run for emergency vehicles wanting to avoid the motorway traffic. Outside the school run I reckon that typical weekday traffic down our road is about half a dozen vehicles an hour (including the buses). If it were a rail line it would be closed down and grubbed up. The myriad closes and cul-de-sacs of suburban England would be even quieter. So you'd not be able to drive your car up to your house, you'd have to park up at the end of the 'viable' stretch of roadway, which may be miles away and make your way home by shanks' - or even literal - pony.

If you had to do that at each end of every car journey you'd not be inclined to do so very much driving. Which is one way of cutting down the carbon footprint of the nation. But no, instead we impose this model on our public transport, thus increasing the carbon footprint. After all, if it's a five- or ten-mile car journey to the train station to catch an unreliable, old, grubby train with poor connections to the other services involved in your journey why wouldn't you just keep on driving?

Ernest Marples at least had a financial interest in putting Beeching up to chopping up the network. I can see no motive for his successors save that they are utter fuckwits.

Regenerating the local economy

Time was, I could nip down the road, get a train to the next town, do the Saturday morning shop and get the next train back. Time was.

They've cut the timetable down so much that I have given up on it: I'd get the early train (the next train being nearly lunchtime); do the shop then wait a hour and a half for the next train.

There is a bus which takes me in, it goes down the road every half hour. So I got to using it. But I've had to give up on that, too, now: I can get into town to shop but I'm damned if I can find a way of getting back that doesn't involve walking home. Redevelopment you see. The town's new shopping complex is being built, which means that the bus stops on teh main road have all been placed out of use. "Go to the next stop" signs have been stuck on the bus shelters, so that I did. And waited for an hour until a friendly soul passed and told me that the buses don't run that way any more either. So I traced back and tried the previous stop, with no success. And taking the bus to the terminus and then back again, mapping the route we take as we travelled. I can't have been furtive enough, they twigged what I was doing: they never went that way again.

And in the end it's not worth it anyway. The council's strategy for building a new shopping complex involved running the old one down over a period of five years, closing each shop unit as the lease ran out. In the end only Farm Foods and the local butcher persisted, hanging on desperately until they were finally forced out. Once they went there was just a small parade of shops and the market left.

Unfortunately they've been running the market down for the past decade, presumably as part of the run-up to the new shopping complex. All that's left is a greengrocer's, a florist and a lady who sells cheap greeting cards. And twenty-seven empty concrete stall settings last painted in 1979.

And doubly unfortunate as the last shop left in the parade was Woolworths.

High speed trains

Particularly awful morning commute today. The train company's response to our having the fourth most badly-overcrowded journey in the country is to drop one of the rush hour services on this line. I'll leave you to imagine the inevitable consequences. I think it must be some sort of misplaced spirit of competition.

Note to Northern Trains: nuts to "we regret that you were unable to get a seat;" how about providing two square feet of standing space and a hand hold that isn't an electric light bulb?

Additional joy was added today by our being stuck at signals for an hour while they nursed a broken-down freight train back into the freight terminal sidings. Inevitably, the mood was depressed further by some loud jackass' invoking the Dunkirk Spirit. Had they been subject to the rules of modern public transport, the brave little boats might be setting out for the continent some time next summer. Only to be turned back at the Goodwin Sands by the wrong type of dogfish.