More Moaning About Trains

Well, what a wonderful week it has been for users of Notwork Rail.

On Monday evening (having suffered the inevitable five hour journey in to work due to "over-running engineering works"), the train behind mine managed to snag and tear down over a mile of overhead electric wire.
This is the same section that got torn down several times last year … and the year before … etc.
The reason being that - while the line in Norfolk and Suffolk only dates back to the 1960s - the line through cheapskate Essex has not been replaced since before WWII.
Add to that the fact that upon privatisation of the railways, the new owners got rid of 60,000 (yes, you heard) maintenance workers across the country and paid themselves obscenely huge bonuses with the money saved.
Since then - as any glance at the news will tell you - we have suffered the most catastrophic decline in rail travel standards in history.
Quite apart from the spate of disastrous crashes with their huge loss of life, the timetables have been padded so much that it now takes longer to travel the route by electric "Fast Inter-City" service than it did in the age of steam (true).

Anyhoo … Back to this week.
Notwork Rail
(a) Immediately put out a statement vigorously denying that lack of maintenance on pre-war infrastructure was anything other than a good thing for everybody, and
(b) Took three days to repair it, and
(c) Announced that the taxpayer will be forced to foot the bill for replacing all the crappy old overhead wires (the maintenance budget for which disappeared into their bonuses) and that the work would not get done until 2012 at the earliest.
I am lucky in that I can work from home, but a lot of people cannot and risk losing their jobs because of this.

Inevitably:
Shortly before the repairs were finished, the cage of a poorly maintained cherry-picker sheared off its arm and came crashing down onto the tracks, carrying the three maintenance workers inside it straight to hospital by air ambulance and halting all repair work.

Hey ho …
They at last announced that repairs were complete late yesterday and stated that "a full service is running, with delays and cancellations due to the disruption", which – a quick check of the realtime information website revealed - actually meant only a third of trains were running and they were being delayed by hours ("full service my arse").

And this morning it was revealed to us happy commuters that a freight train derailed late last night (on poorly maintained track) halfway to London and that - should I be interested in getting to work - my usual three-and-a-half hour journey to the office would involve replacement buses and would take over five hours, with no guarantee I would get home tonight.

So …
Many apologies for getting that out of my system.

Here, to calm my savage breast and as part of my "songs that are shaping my summer" meme, is the lovely Joni (with the lovely Jaco on bass) performing Coyote.