Don’t do it, Deutsche Bahn.

Some­body reads this blog!

I got e-mailed by a guy from a ger­man TV sta­tion who was look­ing for a train­spot­ter to give some views on the privat­isa­tion of Britain’s rail­ways, in the con­text of the pro­posed privat­isa­tion of Germany’s rail­ways. Appar­ently there’s to be an announce­ment on 28 March, and they wanted to fill a slot for the late news.

He was kind enough to come up to York, pick­ing up a local film and sound crew on arrival. They spent some happy hours in the rail­way museum, inter­viewed some rail pas­sen­gers (vox pop they call it) and then turned their atten­tion to me. Whisked me up to Clifton Bridge to pre­tend to phot­graph some trains on a mobile phone and talk about how my interest began — thankyou grand­father and Houn­slow Sta­tion — then on to the Sid­ings res­taur­ant where I had to pre­tend to stride in, order a beer, and sit at a table over­look­ing the main line while being interviewed.

So I pon­ti­fic­ated away on all the bad things I could think of about rail privat­isa­tion in Bri­tain and ended by advising Deutsche Bahn not to do it — at least not our way.

For­tu­nately the trains co-operated by whizz­ing past the win­dows every few minutes very pho­to­gen­ic­ally. They recor­ded about 17 minutes alto­gether — 17 seconds of TV time if we’re lucky.

After the first ses­sion, I found myself listen­ing to the sound engin­eer remin­scing aout his youth in Lan­caster, when he’d obvi­ously been a train­spot­ter too, prob­ably about the same time as me. The ger­man joun­al­ist accused him of “com­ing out”. That’s the way it is for us gricers.

It was a bright, sunny spring even­ing, and I enjoyed doing it. Strik­ing a small blow for pub­lic service.