The 7.20 to King's Cross (Part One)

I am new to blogging and arrived here more or less by accident. My urge to blog was born of the urge to avoid driving to work. If you live in West Yorkshire, you will know that our road system is appreciated by everybody else, mainly because they don't live here. So when I started work in Wakefield I decided to commute by train. The comedy potential of British Rail was legendary, on the basis that if you didn't laugh the only alternative was losing the will to live. British Rail, as a national entity, was known to everybody so the jokes travelled even if the trains didn't. Somehow poking fun at Northern Trains or GNER would not work as well if you live in Guildford or Basingstoke. Admittedly GNER has disappeared and its trains have mysteriously switched allegiance to National Express, which I always thought was a bus company but it's so easy to lose touch.

But if the operators are not particulary amusing in themselves, the system certainly is. Forty minutes commuting in each direction, five days a week, gives rise to familiarity and familiarity breeds a certain degree of contempt. Shoehorning a couple of hundred people into a sealed compartment when they don't particularly want to be there is always bound to generate a certain amount of irritability. It's human nature after all. And humans are territorial and don't like anybody else invading their space, which explains the urge to plonk a bag on the seat next to you and stand by to repel boarders. Having become fed up with asking people to move their bags so I could sit down, I succumbed to the inevitable and went to sit on the suitcase rack instead. At this, a woman promptly came up to me and told me that I shouldn't sit there as she wanted to put her bag on it. This demonstrated that I had fewer rights than a piece of luggage, which seemed grossly unfair as you don't actually have to pay to take a bag with you. Though if Ryanair ever follow Virgin and start a train company, watch this space.

Everyday I change trains at Leeds City station. I don't often go to other major stations so I can't say whether the Health and Safety neurotics have taken over all transport hubs. However there is an unremitting cacophony of safety messages, which seem to play on a constant loop, interspersed only by announcements that the train to Manchester has been delayed, usually by criminal activity involving signalling cable theft or having been left on bricks when the wheels were removed as it paused at Rochdale to let people on and off. We are constantly told that we can't skateboard, cycle or rollerblade along the platforms. I would have thought that was self-evident but it does appear that some people need to have it pointed out to them that if they disobey they are likely to die horribly under the remaining wheels of the delayed train from Manchester Victoria. At least they haven't yet seen fit to warn us not to try hang-gliding or tightrope-walking along the 25 kV overhead wires but once someone is daft enough to try that, someone will have to squeeze in that particular piece of advice.

The weather is also a topic of great concern to the Passenger Safety Manager. At the merest hint of precipitation there is a degree of panic worthy of Peter Kay's dinner lady shouting "It's spitting! Everybody inside!" We are warned not to slip on the platforms, fall under a train or drown. However, bearing in mind that Leeds City Station is almost entirely under cover this appears to be superfluous. Unless of course they know something that we don't, and the roof is about to spring a major leak.......

Part Two to follow as I haven't actually got onto the 7.20 to King's Cross yet......