Yellow Lines

I travel from a small country station in Rural Buckinghamshire.

There will be no trains stopping at, or passing through, the station until Monday morning. This is perfectly normal - Chiltern Railways are currently spending lots of money to shave a few nano-seconds off my regular commute, so for the majority of weekends we have no train service near where I live. This ongoing engineering work means replacement buses running - we actually get more buses than we normally get trains.

Today the Chiltern Railways maintenance people have descended on the local station to take advantage of the lack of trains. They appear to have:

• Painted white lines along the edge of the platforms
• Painted yellow lines along the platforms
• Fixed lots of 'Stand behind the yellow lines' signs to the lamp posts along the platforms

I actually find this maintenance work rather sad. Yes, it makes the station look cared for and maintained, but really it is only being done for elf & safety reasons. We don't have masses of trains call at the best of times. We certainly don't suffer from over-crowded trains and the station could never ever be described as busy.

This isn't a rant - It's rather just a whimsical sigh. I like living in the country and, somehow, these signs of modern rules & regulations appearing in the heart of Rural Buckinghamshire just make me feel somewhat deflated. Sigh.

Soon, they'll be wanting to paint yellow lines down the road as well. Oh! I forgot - they do want to do that!