Robert Hampton

Another visitor! Stay a while… stay forever!

12th August 2009

Stoned
Posted by at 8.02pm | Trains | No responses

Travelling home is usually quite a relaxing experience. After a long day at work and gruelling(ish) session at the gym, it’s nice to sit back for the short journey home, reading my newspaper (or, as it was today, my shiny new RAIL Magazine — there’s a piece about the Class 502 in it, y’know).

Tonight though, the peace was shattered, along with a pane of glass in one of the train’s sliding doors, by a large stone which was hurled at us as we passed under Grafton Street bridge.

No-one was hurt, but it could have been a very different story, if the boy standing next to the door hadn’t moved away at the last second.

Unsurprisingly the train crew took one look at the damage and immediately took the train out of service. As I waited on the platform at Brunswick for the next one, I had time to ponder the incident. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a fairly minor event. It happens all over the rail network on a regular basis. I’ve been on trains before where missiles have been thrown at us (although this is the first time that — ahem — penetration has occurred).

For the smattering of passengers between Hunts Cross and Liverpool Central whose train was cancelled “due to an act of vandalism”, it’s a minor annoyance. But to those travelling in the centre car of unit number 508124 tonight, travelling by train suddenly feels a little less safe, and, irrational as it seems, I’m now glad that about half the seats in Merseyrail’s trains don’t line up properly with the windows.