They came close to having a revolt on their hands last night. The train was very full when we arrived home. I had spent the journey home sitting on the floor while others stood, so you can imagine how many people tumbled out of the doors when they opened up.
And then we discovered the main stairs down from the platform closed by a fallen body as a guy had slipped in the rain. It looked pretty nasty. So they held us back at the top of the stairs.
That wouldn’t be a problem if the back staircase was open, but it wasn’t: the council had dug up the road down at the bottom, and so the rail company’s insistence was that we should instead use the lift.
250 commuters. One lift. You can imagine how long it would take to get us all through that. Half of us would still be there by the time the next train arrived.
Things started to turn ugly and the poor guard at the top of the stairs could see things falling apart around him until, eventually, he gave in.
‘Let’s just kick all that shit out of the way,’ he said, and went to open the back doors, then stood in the rain at the bottom of the staircase, in the pouring rain, making sure none of us fell into the roadworks.
He deserves a medal.
