Fleet Street legend and Mirror columnist, Paul Routledge, sends gentle tales from his West Yorkshire allotment, Mrs R’s pantry and his local, the Old White Bear. This week, puffer-nutter Paul is back out riding the railways, but finds himself on the wrong side of the track when he has to be rescued by station staff
YOU could say the first sign of winter is an overnight frost on the stone roof of our house. Not so. It’s the salt liberally spread on the wooden platform of Cononley station in the next door village.
Network Rail goes to great lengths to prevent us falling down on their property, presumably to avoid claims for injured limbs. And here’s this restless boy on his way to Bristol for an away-day weekend.
Most long-distance journeys go through Leeds, one of the busiest provincial stations in the country, and here I bump into my friend Mike O’Brien, the writer. Writing doesn’t make him a millionaire, any more than it does me, and today he’s working for the Department for Transport as an enumerator.
His job is to count the numbers of people getting on and off the trains, on this occasion at Birmingham Snow Hill. The work takes him all over the country, to glamorous places like Scunthorpe and Southend on Sea.
A lady colleague shares the task, though she’s at a different station in Brum. They both have “clickers” to count the passengers, marked A and J for alighters and joiners. Only on the railway do you hear that old-fashioned word. People never alight from their cars, they just get out.
It’s amazing, in the age of CCTV, that this finicky job has to be done manually by workers on draughty platforms, but I wouldn’t want to do them out of paid employment. I’d do it myself, if there were still steam trains.
I wonder what the DfT does with all these statistics? They don’t seem to give them to the train operators, because the five-coach Cross Country trains are rammed with passengers, some of whom have so much luggage I assume they’re moving house.
On the return journey, I was taken badly at Birmingham New Street. Nothing too serious, but I must say a big Thank-You to station attendant, Rosie, and first-aider Eddie for seeing me straight.
It’s a rum world, the railway. That’s why I like it.
