"All Change"

Have you noticed how everyone seems to be clamoring for change?

Politicians are saying 'Vote for change', maybe, but change in which direction?

East Midland Trains just love to change things as their in-train announcements have a new word for stations: they’re now “calling points”.

This is even sillier than the silliness it replaces: “station stops” (as if, informed that the next “stop” was Leicester, a blind person might try to pile out of the window if the train stopped earlier at signals).

So now Leicester has become a calling point. The train, incidentally, is a “service”. We passengers are “customers”. And in railway-ese the verb “alight” has dropped its “from”. So passengers do not alight from the train at a station:

customers alight the service at a calling point.

Indeed, they all do when the service “terminates”.

Do you think communications boffins change ordinary English words for the sheer hell of it? Or are they just desperate to invent reasons for their own existence?

Music and Trains go together well on my LP by Dave Goulder.

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This to me is a real 'Golden Oldie'. I bought it in 1973 just when a lot of our railways were being closed.

Dave left school at fifteen and worked as a station porter at Kirkby-in-Ashfield.

He later transferred to the locomotive department to become a fireman after doing the usual spell as an engine cleaner and general labourer.

Most of the songs on the LP are on the sad side, but there are also some very amusing ones.

Two of my favourites are: "The day we ran away" and "Pinwherry Dip". This situation in the first is obvious, but the second song tells of a train going up an incline when a coupling breaks, halfway along the line of wagons. Being on a slope, they start to roll back down through Pinwherry Station and back up the slope on the other side.

"Ah, but now that the incline was in the reverse,

Those wagons are rolling once more".

This carries on for several hours...

"They were doing ten minutes a trip"

... until the wagons came to rest in the Dip. The inspector trying to get to sleep....

"But back at the station still lying awake....

.....I'm damned if I knew there were so many trains

in the best bloody part of the night"

And from the news.......

Because there is no rail link from Ffos-y-Fran opencast mine in Merthyr Tydfil to the Brecon Mountain Railway, the coal cannot be used to fire their locomotives.

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The mine's planning permission had stipulated coal could only be moved by rail after residents fought the development following concerns about noise and dust coming from the mine.

Therefore coal from Siberia 3000 miles away, which is brought to the ports, then in container ships to Hull, then by road to Merthyr, is being used.

Jayne Hills, the tourist railway's owner said the regulations were particularly annoying as the local coal would be ideal for use in the newly converted steam locomotive.

"It seems ludicrous that we could get coal from three miles away but instead are being forced to import it from 3000 miles away. I dread to think what the carbon footprint must be like of moving that coal but we have no choice," she said.

O, my god, give me strength!