Train toilets are never pleasant places – this innovation might just make them better. Don’t read this over your breakfast, or if you think the innovation process works
As any railway-person who has worked in a depot will know, train toilets are not somewhere you linger longer than necessary. The list of things not to flush down them is often ignored and even their expected consumption can lead to problems you wouldn’t want to see on your job sheet.
I wrote at length about toilets in October 2018 (‘Something to go on’), recounting among other things the great toilet blockings of 1980 when Canton sidings were filled with festering blocked Mk 1 coach toilets. This was tackled by the innovative means of a sort of soda syphon with a six-inch-long bulb to pressurise it. Neither I nor the depot plumber were going near this thing, but a more strident and eager-to-please manager from the loco side took over the issue. Whenever I see the episode of Mr Bean where he paints the room with a firework in a tin of paint and can’t get out in time I think of him, except it wasn’t white in this case.
WHO YOU GONNA CALL?
Today all unpleasantness is sucked into a retention tank, blockages permitting, yet it is not unusua…
