The UK's newest luxury rail service ~ from London to the Lake District ~ just broke down at Milton Keynes, a quarter of the way there, after its automatic doors failed.
For years I used the 'slam' doors as a commuter on third-rail electrified services into London, and despite being in use for around half a century I don't recall any of them ever failing to open or close... which in an ideal world is everything you want from a door.
Thomas Cooks rail tours meanwhile ran for a century and a half without, to the best of my knowledge, ever failing because passengers could not get in or out.
Meanwhile Edmondson's classic cardboard railway ticket introduced and patented in 1840 continues in use in some of the countries it was exported to two centuries on.
As we dwell on two hundred years of passenger railways, it is worth reflecting upon what works and what doesn't and increasingly the latter includes modern cars.
The desperate net-zero measures in the UK in particular means that increasingly a smaller and smaller engine has to rely on more and more exotic means of squeezing every last ounce of power from that of petrol: which means buying, maintaining and servicing them costs more than ever.
It also means that because fewer make it into the third-tier of used cars of around a decade old, increasingly cars are the preserve of the well-off. At the same time the necessary replacement of failing vehicles with brand new ones emits more carbon or environmental pollution than would be the case were we continuing to operate cars like my own twelve-year old Suzuki.
All tho' what you'd expect from any flavour of government, but especially one that advertises itself as 'socialist' or on the side of the people.
Southern Rail ran electrical multiple units non-stop from East Croydon where I first worked, to London Bridge and as it barrelled along on a summer's evening it was a joy to drop the window and lean your head out like a dog.
Occasionally this meant passengers were decapitated by not withdrawing their head prior impact with a railway bridge or tunnel, but this only added to the excitement.
It also meant the population steadily evolved toward people intelligent enough not to lose their head, or at least not in this way.
You can read a history of trains with doors that worked as per the inset above.
You can't knock the carriages though and I'd be happy to live in one should (a) they deliver to your driveway and (b) retro-fit a slam-door.
