Firetop

Every now and again I come across a group of ticket inspectors at a railway station who seem to be have been vastly over-resourced. At Dorking railway station this morning I found three ticket inspectors sitting outside the Full Monty refreshment shack having a smoke, a gossip and a play on their mobile phones. I’m not surprised they were doing this as Dorking station has only eight trains an hour (and one had just been cancelled), with a lack of people around there really isn’t much to do. So who’s bright idea was it to allocate three ticket inspection staff to such a relatively small station?

It reminded me of a similar experience I had in Victoria station at 3am on a Saturday morning back in May. Having left Turnmills nightclub in Faringdon (after a set by the fabulous Armin Van Buren), ‘Suzie Q’ and I went home via the Gatwick Express at Victoria. There were very few people about (it’s hard to get into Victoria past the jobs-worth security staff), the nine ticket inspectors on platform thirteen outnumbered the customers - so why were there nine of them at that time of the morning? I’ve never seen that many in rush hour! I’m guessing it’s double time after midnight?

As it was, one of the inspectors was giving a bit of attitude about the fact that our normal tickets didn’t cover us for Gatwick Express services as it was a ‘special train’, so I went and bought us first class tickets just to irritate him. Was worth it for the sheer pleasure of saying ‘no actually we have first class tickets so can sit here’, but wasn’t worth it for the value on the train, the carpets and seat coverings were old and threadbare, desperately in need of a refurbishment, more like third class.

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