Thursday

Monkeys and Ladybirds

The Twenty-Eighth of July Two Thousand and Eleven. Thursday.

It's an odd thing working in the Travel Centre - the bit that deals with information and enquiries - of the railway station. It fascinates me. On one level you would think it would be simply answering queries - question asked, answer given. But the complicated nature of railways in this country often means that there isn't always a straightforward reply when someone asks. If the enquiry itself is fiddly, well, that's when it gets interesting. A lot of the time the journey someone intends to make may be simple, but the reasons behind it might be involved. It's amazing how many times people manage to find a way to squeeze in a quick (or not so quick) deposition concerning why they're travelling. Just today a woman said 'I won't waste your time' and then went into detail about her problems with the council and a neighbour who was stalking her!

Sometimes, in the course of bantering with a customer they'll pass on a tale or piece of information that catches my imagination. Yesterday, this happened on a couple of occasions.

A familiar song on the rails is how expensive train tickets are in this country. A more philosophical version of this questions why our rail tickets are so complicated. I'm afraid I've become too institutionalised to have any useful answers here - I see my role as trying to navigate through it all, solving any problems while not worrying too much what caused them. But I was heartened when one customer informed me that the ticket structure in the UK was simplicity itself compared to that in Hungary. He claimed that there were variations and concessions for every different member of society - students, elderly, unemployed, etc. - and then capped his entertaining anecdote with the revelation that there are train tickets for monkeys in Hungary.

Think about that for a second: monkey train tickets. Why don't we have that?

Fare dodgers are always a problem, though.



A quick bit of googling reveals that the monkey fare is in fact no longer with us - replaced with a much less satisfying 'pet fare' - phooey! But this blog here has a screenshot of when it was on the Hungarian Railways website along with the myriad of other concessions they offer (attendant of a travelling group of orphans is another winner).

Another passenger was on their way to Loughborough, a station I can't think about without remembering the big sign that used to be on the platform proclaiming the town to be 'The Home of Ladybird Books'. Sadly, Ladybird no longer publish, but I can't help mention this fact anytime someone buys a ticket to there. This time, the woman I was speaking to revealed her grandma was featured in one of the illustrations in a Ladybird book. When pressed she couldn't remember which, but I thought it was a pretty good claim to fame nonetheless. It probably wouldn't have been one I'd read. The two that stick in my mind were typically masculine and fact-based: 'How it Works: The Motorcycle' and 'How it Works: The Locomotive'.



To this day I owe the former tome for my knowledge of the difference between a four-stroke and a two-stroke engine. Today, you can look up that sort of stuff on the interwebs, which to be honest is what I've just done now and found this brilliant website which features animations of many types of engine including the ever-popular Wankel rotary engine (stop sniggering at the back) (which was used in the rather fabulous NSU Ro80:


That was one that featured on the What Car? lists of my youth).

'How it Works: The Locomotive' was where I learned about Hydraulic transmission and the cylinder arrangement on a Deltic engine. Neither of which have proved particularly useful over the years, but I bet they will one day.

Oh, and I know how to say ladybird in sign language. I had a very good teacher.






More soonliest.

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