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WHEN first standing for London mayor in 2000, Ken Livingstone was asked by a journalist: “Can you tell us a joke?”
“Salman Rushdie was on a train and it pulled into a station,” he began. “He saw Yasser Arafat and his entourage of bodyguards and was so overcome with the emotion of seeing his great hero, he raced to embrace him. But the bodyguards weren’t very well versed in modern literature and had no idea who he was.
“So they shot him dead, thus proving the value of that old adage: never go for a Shi’ite while the train is in the station.”
You might think this joke of questionable taste had been rendered obsolete by the advent of toilet retention tanks on trains.
After extensive lobbying of ScotRail and Transport Scotland, in 2015 rail union RMT secured a pledge that toilets flushing directly onto the tracks would be phased out north of the border from the end of 2017.
But now ScotRail’s cascaded Intercity 125 trains, 40 years old but the most loved in modern British history, are plopping on the tracks once more.
The trains are being fitted with toilet tanks, but have entered service prior to refurbishment. It’s no wonder the RMT was protesting outside Glasgow’s Queen Street terminus this week.
The Intercity trains should be marking a step forward for a railway which has taken too many steps back. And yet they are now a talking point for outraging the decency of rail workers. Ministers and rail bosses are in danger of dirtying these trains’ excellent reputation.