It all began on the morning of Friday 19th at Earlsfield
when a member of the public got down onto the track to retrieve her phone. She
was then hit by a train. Earlsfield is between Wimbledon and Clapham Junction,
as you can imagine being here and at peak time it was busier than it would be
at 3am.
Thankfully for her the train was slowing down for the
station and she was not rent asunder and now has the rest of her life to be
thankful that she got her phone back whilst she sits/lays paralysed, now being
fed by a straw and having tubes up her unmentionables to deal with the other
end of the operation. Sadly her condition now stops her from taking selfies
from her hospital bed, but at least she might get somebody to show her all
those friends on Facebook who have posted sad emoji's on her wall.
Also she was denied the misery that hundreds of thousands
of other passengers had to undergo that day for the ten hours that trains were
disrupted whilst the police investigated the incident and made a pile of
overtime on the side - every cloud and all that!!!! She could have read about
it all on Twitter on her phone, now she is #EarlsfieldTrainVegetable.
Then along came Saturday, all was quiet across the SWT
network, Salisbury was it's usual charming self up until about 6:30pm when an
escaped psychiatric patient climbed onto the roof of at train at the east end
of the station and refused to come down, the police were called. Now I have
been told that in a situation like this the people you should not ask to deal
with this are the police - I was told this by a policeman, the reason for this
was to become all too apparent. They would have been better advised to call
Sooty & Sweep, the police were beyond inept, the got the Network Rail
people who brought some ladders and we all waited for somebody to climb up and
speak to the man on the roof. Nope! These ladders were for display purposes
only and were left against the wall, we were not even treated to the clueless
comedy cops doing the old 'Turn round with the ladder over your shoulder whilst
everyone ducks routine.' All we got was some modern performance art that
involved a lot of hi-viz clothing and pointing at things until we became part
of the act and were moved back down the platform.
To add a bit of further drama a train was allowed into
the station (as all trains were stopped) with all six coaches full of drunk
Portsmouth football supporters with a grand total of one diminutive female
officer to deal with this lot - the phrase 'Pissing in the wind' sprang to
mind. Thankfully they sent her reinforcements in the form of an officer who was
just hanging on for his pension, so presumably the plan was for her to hold the
drunken horde off whilst he trundled off on his police mobility scooter
(complete with flashing light and siren) for help. As three of this six coaches
came out of service I was the lucky driver who had to uncouple it and take it
away. I have never seen a train in such a foul mess, drink and goodness knows
what everywhere and it ponged like a urinal in summer. Now am a biased as I
hate football and everything to do with it, but after walking through that
train I reached previously undiscovered dimensions of hatred that would make
the Third Reich look a bit lame and liberal.
Needless to say this part of the train did not move as I
had to take my break (as enshrined in law BTW following the Clapham crash) and
duly got the hell away from this.
Within half an hour the man had been talked down off the
roof of the train. This is now where truth is stranger than fantasy and
highlights for me that the police are nothing more than security guards in
fancy dress. He was talked down by one of our drivers, who brought him a coffee
and with a few well chosen words diffused the situation. I have no idea what
those words were - they could have been anything from 'Have you ever seen a
grown man naked' to 'You think you've got problems, you should see the meds I'm
on and they still let me drive a train!!!' The laughable part is that the
police mistook him for a member of Network Rail staff and just waved him
through to do it. Thankfully it worked, I shudder to think what would have
happened if it hadn't.
So the trains got running again, albeit delayed. However
three hours later people from the psychiatric unit he had escaped from came to
the station asking if we had seen him - where in Salisbury is this institution?
Adjacent to the railway station!
Well, the weekend is not yet over so we have yet to see
what unalloyed pile of shite today is going to drop on us!
