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Commuters object to rail company’s news and adverts plan

A PARTY of protesting ladies who tried to lock themselves in the lavatory yesterday were thwarted when they found that it was out of order.

Passengers on the 7.13am commuter service to London from Thorpe Bay, Essex, had hatched a demonstration against the train company’s plan to install television screens in each carriage, breaching that silent barrier zone of semi-consciousness between bed and work with news, commercials and travel updates.

The ladies proposed to vent their ire by spending the entire journey in the toilets, the only place on the train where the babbling screens will be out of earshot. It wasn’t quite standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, but it would have made a point.

Unfortunately, the protesters failed to take account of the fact that they were travelling on a peak-hour commuter train in the South-East of England; the toilets were out of order.

What was conceived as a mass lock-in ended up with three ladies eventually finding a working toilet after many supporters had got off the train, and cramming into it for a good ten minutes.

The gesture might never have reached a wider world had not one of the ringleaders been Anneliese Dodds, the prospective Labour parliamentary candidate for Billericay. Anyone trying to overturn a Tory majority of 5,013 needs all the publicity they can get, however slender the stunt.

“We ended up with three of us in one toilet. Because they are designed for wheelchairs, they are quite big,” Ms Dodds said after her ordeal.

She is not alone, however, in her opposition to the invasion of commuter time. Pauline Cridland, of the Thurrock Rail Users’ Group, which is also opposed to in-train television, said: “We have been bombarded with protests that this would vandalise passengers’ own time to read, doze, study or think.”

Jonathan O’Neil, spokesman for the train operating company c2c, dismissed the protests as uninformed. “A portion of each carriage will be without screens, and we will extend that ban to mobile phones and personal stereos,” he said.

But he admitted two key points: that the volume would be turned up as trains went through tunnels, and his company expected to make a profit from the screens. He said that protesters had not tried to discuss the issue with the company. “We aren’t ashamed in the slightest that we will make a profit from the screens,” he said. “There is a section of society that seems to have missed that the railways were privatised in 1995.”

At least British Rail left you in peace to be late.

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Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.