All aboard the Heatstroke Express

Any chance you could turning the heating down a bit..?

Welcome on board this 0727 service to Heatstroke, calling at Overly-Hot, Boiling, Gasping and terminating at Hypothermia Central.

Despite ongoing industrial action and fare price-hikes, there is something our rail service seems particularly good at providing; trains which are either Arctic-cold, or Sahara-hot. As most of us are neither penguins nor scorpions, this really isn’t helpful.

A recent journey to Leeds on one of Northern’s finest fell-out-of-a-timewarp carriages was a classic example of the former. At no point in the journey did I remove my woolly hat, de-glove, or even contemplate unzipping my coat. True, it’s possible that the carriage was put into service before heating the indoors was a thing. Or possibly they just ran out of logs for the fire.

With rolling stock that came into being this side of the millennium, the problem is usually at the other extreme of the temperature range. I know Scotland has a reputation for being somewhat parky, but a Virgin Trains return from Edinburgh saw us in a carriage so hot, I had to distract myself from encroaching dehydration by thinking up appropriate announcements.

Rather than the usual “Mind the gap between the train and the platform edge”, or that weird one about plain crisps (“See it, say it, salted”), I’d like to suggest the following:

“Would the passengers who have turned the luggage rack into a makeshift sauna by pouring lager on the heating vents to create steam, please put their clothes back on and return to their seats.”

"Next stop is Carlisle. Please refrain from crowding round the doors to get a breath of cool air, or pleading with people on the platform to give you water."

"Passengers in coach B are requested not to cook bacon on the heating vents."

"The buffet car is now open. Two minutes is the fridge is available for £5. Why not treat yourself to some ice cubes for an extra £3.50?"

"Please refrain from licking condensation off the windows in a desperate attempt to alleviate heat exhaustion."

They’ve got to spend the extra money they’re getting from the price increases earlier this month on something. It’s clearly not going on comfort, making trains run on time, or installing toilets that don’t make the entire carriage smell like you just fell face-first into a sewerage tank.

It would appear they’re blowing it on cooking passengers. It probably helps them sell more of that strangely unpalatable tea, too. The sandwiches aren’t actually all toasted either– they’ve just been out of the fridge for more than ten minutes.

Somewhere around 1620 (the year, not 4.20pm in trainspeak), Dutch boffin Cornelius Drebbel invented the thermostat, allowing him to regulate the temperature of a chicken incubator. Far be it from me to tell our train operators what technology to adopt but seeing as, like Drebbel’s hens, we’re cooped up in artificially warm boxes for hours on end, perhaps it’s time to give it a try.

Or make the wifi work. I can always drink more over-priced luke-warm water.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 12th of January 2018. You can view the version used on their website here.

In a wonderful bit of irony, yesterday featured a bus replacement service nightmare out of Edinburgh, involving a coach, a train and a minibus, a closed station and two near-accidents. And getting home at midnight, three hours later than planned. Fun times.

Was this my last ever "Thank grumpy..." column?

(CD A-Z: They Might Be Giants - "The Else".)

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