Skip to main content

No more pay as you go

50p?! You're really taking the piss...

Some things in life are deeply inconvenient.

Like having to scrabble around to try and find some change, so you can queue up and pay, just to use the loo at a railway station. Especially if your need is of the pressing variety.

For a long time, the pay to pee fee has applied at some Network Rail-managed stations – in some cases, spending a penny actually cost 50 pence, which is taking the... well, you get the idea.

Mercifully, free loos are set to return next year, after outgoing chief exec, Marc Carne, decided it was time to “treat people with dignity and respect”. Good call. Shame it’s taken so long to do.

Network Rail will be caught short to the tune of millions of pounds per year, although it must be possible for costs from exorbitantly-priced train fares to be re-directed to flow towards toilet provision and upkeep in some way.

Quite why it will take until next year, in some cases, to sort out is harder to fathom. Surely taking out some barriers can’t be that difficult, can it? They must be round the u-bend if they can’t just leave them open, or set to operate without desperate commuters having to shovel coins into a slot.

Credit to Carne, though. As he correctly states, “I think it is quite wrong to penalise people when they are in discomfort. Our job should be to make their life easier, not more difficult.”

I’m relieved to hear that.

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 9th of March 2018. They added "at stations" to the end, and included a picture of a concourse somewhere and another of train tracks. OK...

(CD A-Z: Stevie Wonder's "The Definitive Collection".)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...