Disgruntled Commuter

Playing sardines

It's that heartsink moment: you arrive at the train station and your platform has twice the number of people waiting than usual. This can mean only one thing - a cancelled train.
For the last six months I have been getting up fifteen minutes earlier (that's six a.m.) in order to catch the theoretically less crowded 7:15. At first this meant a choice of seats. Then it came down to a choice of rubbish seats (you know the ones in the middle of the three by two seats? Not so much a seat as a lap, if both your neighbours are in any way wider than Kate Moss) Then it was standing until Highbury. But since I've been getting the earlier train I've never had to lever myself on the way I did this morning. And I have never before felt seriously worried about crushing - if not of myself, then of some of the shorter people on the train some of whom were looking decidedly unhappy.


What was striking was how polite everyone was. People getting on, people attempting to get off, people with their noses in your armpit, people with their armpits in your nose - all of them apologising like mad. It was 'excuse me' and 'sorry' all the way - apart from the Scottish bloke who shot out of the doors at Caledonian Road like a cork out of a bottle, shouting 'free at last!' I suppose when you are pressed so close to each other that you all have to breathe in unison, there's no point getting stroppy. It was only when the crush started to ease that normal service was resumed and people began elbowing each other out of the way again. Or maybe it was just that only then could they deploy their elbows effectively.


Actually I'm being unfair. Mostly passengers on the Silverlink are an amazingly polite, well ordered bunch. Even when you're sitting in their lap.
14.4.05 20:44


And then there was one

I suppose it had to happen. Last autumn somebody planted three birch trees outside Hackney Central station. They are rather tall - about ten foot high - but very slender with the base of the 'trunk' of the biggest barely thicker than my thumb. And they were planted with absolutely no protection at all - no stake, tie, or tree guard.


All winter they survived, despite being planted at a bad time of year, and despite the lack of protection. I began to think that maybe their very vulnerability was protecting them - there was something very trusting about these three little trees right in the middle of big, bad Hackney. A few weeks ago they finally came out in leaf, in that lovely bright tender green of spring. And two days ago the first one was snapped off at about hip-height, and I've just come back home to find the second one pulled over and broken right off at ground level.


There are other things to get cross about, but this bugs me unreasonably. They weren't harming anyone. They were just sitting there soaking up CO2 and being trees and adding a little cheer to the morning. Grrr. Why?
15.4.05 21:12


Sit!

Sitting on the platform at Hackney Downs on Saturday we noticed that two trains (Chingford and Enfield Town) were both due to arrive at the same time on the same platform, and both of them were allegedly on time. Huh? How does that work? We feared there would be a nasty collision. First the Chingford train was coming in first, then the Enfield one. Were the drivers racing out of Liverpool Street like boy racers, overtaking each other at the signals? We've been fooled by the destination boards at Hackney Downs and got on the wrong train before.


In the event, the bossy woman who announces the trains at Hackney Downs decided it. It was Enfield Town. She has one of those cut-glass, decisive voices, the sort of thing that brings recaltricant labradors to heel. The way she announces 'Heckney Downs' reminds me of recordings of the old Home Service of the BBC. No train, driver, or signaller, having been told it was going to Enfield Town, would dare disobey. We arrived at our destination safely and were neither rear-ended by the other train, nor ended up in Chingford by mistake.


It's slightly worrying though, if the software that drives the destination boards is the same that manages the signals. Surely they can't really have scheduled two trains to arrive at the same time on the same platform? Have they so little faith in their own punctuality? Or have they lost track of their own trains? I will continue to put my faith in the bossy woman, even though she's no more than a set of stitched together recordings put out by the same software. Roll on the classless society.
17.4.05 16:40


The Unlocked Room Mystery

I thought I knew why it was that the waiting room on the westbound platform of Hackney Central never seemed to be used by anyone. Even when it's absolutely tipping down, everyone huddles round under the eaves and canopy, but never inside the room itself. The rest of us are forced to huddle under the scant shelter of the pedestrian bridge like so many damp pigeons. I thought I knew the reason, but today - it being a wet miserable monday morning - in the spirit of journalistic enquiry I decided to check myself.


To my surprise though, once I'd made my way past the people massed in front of the doorway, and the cleaning equipment that had been left leaning against the door, I found that it _didn't_ smell like a public toilet and apart from a few fag ends and a 'no smoking' sign there was absolutely no reason why anyone wouldn't want to wait in there. In fact, I thought about waiting in there myself, but I felt so self conscious being the only person in the waiting room, with everyone else clustered outside in the rain that, after careful study of the 'London Connections' poster that was in there (so it looked like I'd gone in for a reason) I slunk out again and joined the rest of the passengers under the footbridge, which really does make a very poor rain shelter indeed.


After a quick unscientific survey (conducted by looking out of the window during the rest of the journey) I can conclude that only Hackney Central has this problem. The other stations on the North London line have a variety of different ways of keeping out of the rain - from what look like abandoned bus stops to full elaborate canopies covering the whole platform - and none of them appear to be shunned by the passengers in the way this one does. Is it haunted? I think we should be told.
18.4.05 22:54


Brownie points

Twice in the past week I have acheived the ultimate result in the smug git stakes - offering to give up my seat without actually having to stand. The key is to guilt trip someone else into offering their seat instead. The other key is offering your seat to the right person.
The first time it was a guy carrying a baby - no problems there. Nobody could mistake a full blown baby, waving its arms and gurgling, for anything else. No chance that the guy was going to turn out to be merely fat, and mortally offended. And in the event the man sitting next to me stepped up to the plate and offered his seat instead.


Last night it was a bit trickier. How old do you have to be to be more grateful to be offered a seat than upset at being seen to be old? She had white hair - check - and wrinkles - double check - but the way she made her way up the carriage suggested she had more life in her than I do after the average working day. Sprightly is the word I'm looking for. However - I offered, she refused, the chap across the aisle said he was getting off at the next stop anyway, she took the seat and everybody was left with their honour satisfied and no skin of anyone's nose.


The baby, on the other hand, spent the rest of the train journey trying to dismantle my Guardian. So I think I'll stick to the old people next time.
19.4.05 18:30


How the other half lives

Today my glamorous day job takes me to Brussels on the Eurostar for a meeting so no Silverlink for me. I am looking forward to it (the Eurostar, not the meeting) to a rather ridiculous degree, I don't know why. Mostly I fly for work trips so I suppose this makes for a change. And there's still a vestige of glamour that clings to these trains which has totally gone from other forms of international travel. No doubt I shall be disappointed.


Watch this space 
20.4.05 10:41


Blessed are those with Low Expectations ...

... for they shall not be disappointed.
Eurostar was, as expected, disappointing. It's a lot better than the Silverlink, naturally, but compared even with a service like GNER the trains look a little shabby. The seats are almost all airline type ones rather than tables and the one I was sat at (or supposed to sit at) didn't even have a window. Fortunately the train both ways was empty enough that we could relocate ourselves to a convenient table. I also got trapped in one of their doors between the carriages - they shut pretty firmly, those things. However it wasn't all bad - fast, convenient, and I even got to fill in a survey & I love filling in surveys. They missed a trick though: they listed a number of boxes to tick as to why you'd selected Eurostar - like price (not bloody likely at 99 quid EACH WAY), convenience, room to work (in an airline style seat?) and so on. But there wasn't an option for 'causes less pollution' which was one of the considerations for me. There wasn't even an 'other'. It's pretty arrogant of survey designers to assume they've included all of the options, especially when they haven't.


I also got to take my first ever tram. Brussels has a pretty good system, and as our conveniently placed city centre hotel had overbooked itself and shunted us off to somewhere out in the suburbs we got to test it faily extensively. They're probably easier to use for a stranger than buses would be, a bit faster (but still get held up in traffic in the rush hour) full of very helpful Bruxellois who told us when we were just about to miss our stop, and not particularly cheap. People even let me speak French to them, which never happens in Paris. They would politely conceal the fact that they knew more English than I did until the point where my schoolgirl vocabulary had exhausted itself and replied n-i-c-e a-n-d s-l-o-w-l-y a-n-d c-l-e-a-r-ly. And there's a chocolate shop on every corner. What's not to like?
23.4.05 18:18


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