UK - A platform for happiness

[John Ashworth]

A platform for happiness

Rail visionaries talk of stations as community hubs - but train firms are busy putting up barriers

Andrew Martin
The Guardian, Saturday 7 February 2009

We have always visited railway stations for reasons other than making a journey. In the early days people would go to stations not so much to find out the time as to marvel at the sight of the clock; later, they might go to buy a meal, deposit a chopped-up body in a trunk at left luggage (there was a brief vogue for this in the interwar years), buy a racy novel at the bookstall, or watch the trains.

Today, railway visionaries talk of new stations serving high-speed lines and functioning as exemplary community hubs. The theory is being put into practice at St Pancras in London, where it was noted on a public holiday last year that a third of those present had no intention of catching a train.

In the north-east, however, something more churlish is happening. A publicity genius at National Express East Coast proposed closing Darlington station to those wanting to see off the new steam locomotive, Tornado, on its first run to London today. This was on the grounds of health and safety, and the decision was reversed after a swingeing denunciation in the Northern Echo: "Silly Buffers".

But at Grantham, Newark Northgate, Wakefield Westgate, York, Darlington, Durham, Newcastle and Berwick, the company is turning "open stations" into permanently closed stations by installing gates that will cut off the platforms to those without tickets. This is mainly for "revenue protection": to stop people getting on or off trains without paying.

It is the trend throughout the network, and National Express East Coast, a good operator in many ways, is required to put in the gates by the typically grasping terms of its franchise - terms against which, according to a recent report, it may be chafing badly. The company contends that "honest passengers won't object to the gates".

Well, I'm an honest passenger and I object, especially to those planned for the beautiful grade II-listed station at York, and in this I'm joined by more than 300 individuals and organisations.

I spent half my boyhood on York station, either looking out for Deltic locomotives, going to the gents, drinking tea or just watching people. It was interesting to earmark someone waiting on a platform and see who came up to kiss them when the train came in. A visit to, say, Paddington in London can still be enjoyed in this way, especially on Friday evening, when a brass band plays and the place is full of life. Some of the platforms there are closed off but, it being a terminus, most of the bustle is concentrated on the concourse, whereas if you shut off the platforms at a through station like York and the others mentioned above, you attack the heart.

It's true that, for much of its history, York's platforms were protected by gates, the movement for opening stations being a product of British Rail staff cuts in the late 1980s. But early photographs show, by the gates, machines dispensing platform tickets of a kind rarely available now. I asked a National Express spokesman if these tickets could be reintroduced, and he said they would "add another layer to an already complicated ticket-pricing structure". Perhaps I overestimate the difficulty of administering a machine marked "Platform tickets, 50p".

Platform passes are to be issued at the discretion of a guard. Many young men with cameras and notebooks, I fear, will not make it through. After all, they could be al-Qaida members. I asked another spokesman what would happen if I approached a platform guard and said I just liked wandering around on platforms, and he replied: "I think we'd look very sympathetically on that request."

Yeah, I bet.

• Andrew Martin's novel, The Last Train to Scarborough, is published in March

andrew.jmartin@virgin.net