Great Western Coffee Shop

Is it just me... or have the toilets on the regional fleets (Class 150 and 158) been a bit of a state lately??

I can think of 5 occasions (but would really rather not) of where the toilets on regional fleet trains have been barely if not at all usable!! >:(

I would complain about the state of the train I got on earlier as that was most unpleasant - but as my last complaint was somewhat toilet related (more discovering something in a toilet that I unfortunate pleasure of stepping on... and could have proved very unpleasant should it have been found by a small child... :-X) i'm reluctant to complain for fear of getting a name for myself.........

Or is thetrout being silly again...?? :D ;D :-X

No you are not being silly Trout, it's just sad to say that train toilets, particularly on regional local services, are best avoided. I don't think they are as well maintained as on long distance services but even these at times leave a lot to be desired after a long journey. Not helped by modern IC trains such as Voyagers and Pendolinos having less toilets than you would find on an HST/Mk3 coach which mostly have two per carriage rather than 1 per carriage.

the trout i urge you to complain as the west fleet toilets are an absolute disgrace.
i can name several 158's that have had missing/broken toilets for a matter of MONTHS not days,staff continue to report issues but nothing ever gets done to them.if you see one locked look on the label as crew put a date on them when it was locked the depot normally just renew the label so pax dont see the date is weeks/months old.
it makes a mockary of the little stickers they have put in toilets saying FGW strive to have the best facilities and they are cleaned and maintained on a regular basis,really i beg to differ!!!!!!
another problem is a lot of the hand towel holders are broken and as such no way of drying hands.

in stark contrast the HST fleet do not seem so bad in the toilet dept,maybe if the west dmu's went in the direction of the capital things would be different????

RUBBISH, utter rubbish. We do no such thing.

For ages now we have been repainting walls and replacing damged/missing toilet seats, towelmasters & soap dispencers by the dozen every week.

The reason things are declining currently is becuase it is getting to the point now where they are being broken so often that we are running low on stock of parts to replace/repair them and the other damage being done (acid etching/vandalism etc) is often too severe to be sorted on the FPXs the units have over night, which have very narrow windows for repairs, meaning they have to be deffered until the next A/B Exam.

The only people to blame for the state of the toilets on the west fleet are the people (i use that term very loosley) who use the trains. Some people are worse than animals, for example....

I was en-route to Westbury several weeks ago, riding a troublesome unit with a Mob Tech. Sat in the leading cab, arriving at Bath a rather attractive lady caught my eye on our platform and a quick glance out of the front set of doors confirmed that she boarded our unit.

Later on leaving Bradford-O-A we walked through the train to the back cab to take some voltage readings from the Train wire terminals and coinciently I notied her entering and locking the disabled toilet as we walked down the train.

When we arrived at Trow, the guard came down to the back cab looking pretty sickend and we asked him what was wrong. Speechless, he lead us down the train and opened the disabled toilet door which he had LOOU. We were greeted by one of the most disgusting smells and sights I have seen to date (and ive seen trains post one-under). There was feaces all over the toilet pan and rim, on the open lid and even in the area between the pan and the wall, literally running down the wall along with toilet paper crammed down the pan. It didnt even look like the person had sat down.

It was vile and we then realised that considering the timescale, it must have been the 'work' of the woman i noticed earlier, who we could see sat further down the next coach & as we left the unit at Westbury, she was seen causually walking down the steps to the subway. I couldnt believe that someone so innocent looking and well presented could do such a rancid thing...

It was simply vile and i really pitty the poor person who had the unfortunte task of cleaning up the mess.

Glad I'd finish my dinner before reading the proceeding post!

Sorry, probably should of added a content warning at the beginning of the post!!

Maybe, but it least it serves as a reminder to us all of what has to be put with at times in a public serving company such as the railways.

(TMI WARNING)


I want to know HOW people do that

The worst I did was at kew bridge station - morning after a heavy session and curry

On the way to the station - had the urge.  Was half way between the Mc Donalds and the station where I was about to arrive on time for train.

Continued forth

Got onto train - a 450 HC from waterloo to weybridge

and Had no choice - was only after I went I discovered there was no water in the tank - this was about 0800 in the morning.  I found the TM and suggested he lock it out of use - I feel for the poor people who had to clean it - had there been water I would have flushed numerous times

But in the case described above - HOW?

LOL

Dehli Belly!!! haha

We still to this day cant get our heads around it.

The unit was 99% certain tanked becuase the hand basin certainly worked and the unit had come off of the depot with a fresh FPX that morning after spending several days being picked apart on fault finding but being 'NFFd' (No Fault Found!). It failed later at Pompey with a totally differant problem to what we were riding it for!!!

In my almost 5 years on the Railway so far, i have seen and heard of some horrific and unbelievable things found by cleaners, maintenance staff and production support over the years, on the West fleet and the HSTs. Some of the carraige cleaners have told me stomach churning tales...

It wasn't 950 was it? had that fail rather mysteriously on me a couple of Sundays back

what about 798 missing the pan for best part of 10 months,954 had toilet out of use for 4 months waiting spares,959 with a blocked pan for 2 months????????

im with sprog on this one i also work on the west fleet DMU's and alot of the reason the toilets are L.O.O.U is due to vandilism, and having short supply of stock to repair them and also lack of time on an FPX at night to fix them, they wouldnt treat their toilets at home like it so why should they treat our trains like it??? how would they like it if i went round to their houses and kicked the toilet seat off and rammed a hole roll of tissue paper down the pan and flushed it so it over flowed all over the floor, and smeared feaces all over the walls they wouldnt like it at all. i have seen some horrific sights in the toilets on the west fleet and some of them have made me physically sick and i have a very strong stomach, and another thing is every toilet is graffitied by KNOE i wish some one would catch him at it and make him repaint all the panels and replacce all the windows he has damaged!!!!!!!!!!

Being a multiskilled technician, not a toilet technician, i couldnt tell you precisely, but you have answered your own question for the first two units you mentioned. 798 didnt have a 2nd standard toilet when it came over to FGW, it was just an empty room. The toilet was slowly reinstated bit by bit (alot of work) each time it visited SPM for a B exam, then a stumbing point was hit with regards to sourcing an apprppriate toilet pan & seat assembly to fit. Unfortuntely, nothing ever seems to happen fast on the railway and for reasons totally beyond me, the toilets and pans are specially made to order believe it or not, hence the long lead times. 959, no idea...must have been one big **** for it to take 2 months to clear it!!!  ;D

This topic just goes to show what work FGW staff actually have to do to keep things  operational, i really do think at times passengers think the trains are put away at night and started up the next morning....just like your car!!
As all of the stock is 20 plus years old ... just try popping into your local ford dealer for a wiper motor for that 1985 ford escort you have tucked up in the garage and see how you get on

I do pity the staff, but the HST loos do seem to be better.  If it is not a difference in maintenance, is it just that there are more of them or do HSTs attract a better class of passengers?

I think that's largely the case, OK HST's do sometimes have some scum on board, but generally speaking they don't do short distance stopping routes on which a lot of the vandals, graffiti mob, and general low life target - i.e. suburban services in and around Bristol, Cardiff and London - after all, they don't want to be on the train any longer than they have to be.

.... and perhaps it is easier to get away without paying your fare on those services (assuming most vandals don;t have tickets)?

If anyone is really interested in the complexities of operation for train toilets then can I suggest they head up to the National Railway Museum in York this weekend (20/21 November).

http://www.nrm.org.uk/PlanaVisit/Events/toiletdaytrail.aspx

 ::) :-\ ;D

Incidentally, World Toilet Day (http://www.worldtoilet.org/wtd/) (subtitled: 'the big squat' - I kid you not!) is this coming Friday (19th). Bet you are all glad you now know that!!

I should add, there is an important message behind the 'Day'.

The line "answering the big question: what happens when you flush the loo on a train?" on that link made me LOL!

There was a commedian (Possibly Jimmy Carr) that did a rant about the railways and one line that refers to this "We're in the 21st centuary and yet we're still cr*pp*ing on the track :o "

Much prefered by me over retention toilets which don't have enough water for a proper flush, although I might have a different view if I worked on track maintenance.

<Idiot mode*>Do all trains used on our railways at the moment have retention toilets or are we still dumping onto tracks?  If we are still dumping, is there any cleaning process first?</Idiot mode>

* = I genuinely don't know the answer to this!

I think most trains now have retention tanks, that stink the train out (vomiters).
The only ones I can think of that dump (straight onto the track) are the HST sets and some DMU's.

AIUI the cutoff for DMUS is that all DMUs up to 158s were non-retention as built, 159/0s were fitted during their original conversion (from 158s) before entering service, and later stock as built is all retention tank fitted.

(SWT's 158s and 159/1s have had tanks retrofitted but they are the exceptions.)

Paul

Such loco-hauled mark 1, 2 and 3 stock as remains in use also drops things straight down the chute. Looking on the bright side, at least there's a u-bend; I've been on Regional/InterRegional Italian trains before where you could look down the pan and watch the ballast whizzing by. Rather draughty if you need to sit down, and slightly oddly FS has (or used to have) specially made monogrammed toilet roll and paper towels.

An interesting exception is mark 3 sleeper vehicles, which were built with retention tanks from new, I assume so that passengers could use them in stations during the dwells at the start/end of the journey to let people board early or have a lie-in.

Interesting, I'd have thought that all stock would be retrofitted with retention toilets, but obviously not.

Must be a lovely job for the Network Rail engineers when they discover a turd on the line...

Would that be on the 'turd' rail?  ;D

Where's me coat?

Read something in the Ciras mag about NR staff getting p***ed off about having nasty stuff sprayed over them by overflowing retention tanks on the ECML when they took a curve.
NR response was something along the lines of, well we give them paper suits.

Cough, splutter: http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=5751.msg55349#msg55349  ::) :o

Sounds like a relatively easy job, doesn't it? In fact I would guess that it's a pretty huge engineering challenge working out where to fit retention tanks below the solebar on a whole range of stock that wasn't designed to have it in the first place. Not necessarily insurmountable, but almost certainly very expensive and probably not economically viable given the remaining lifespan of most of FGW's stock (although having said that there's no replacements on the horizon just yet...!). You'd also need to equip depots with the facilities to empty huge numbers of bogs reasonably swiftly too.

As an aside, I was always a little puzzled by the heat that GNER/NXEC (can't remember which is was at the time) was getting for leaks from the mark 4 fleet given that there are many other operators in the country whose fleets just dump it straight on the ground.

Another point to remember is that it's not just track staff who are affected by "straight on the ground" toilets. They can also make life unpleasant for shunters and depot engineering staff, since flushing a loo into a 125 mph slipsteam means that a lot of it gets plastered over the vehicle's underframe.

Cough, splutter, indeed. Spit, wipe and possibly hurl as well. If these poor track workers have a vehicle parked close by it could also be a case of the sh*t hitting the van!

Retrofitting the 158s with tanks is already proven. The problem is you then have to provide the emptying facilities at all their overnight stabling points. That could be a significant extra cost comparable with the work on the actual units, and I doubt any TOCs will take it on until forced to by DfT.

Paul

Didn't FGW try and fit a timer delay to HST toilets to prevent them from being flushed in stations??

I recall seeing this only once on a HST set running BRI - PAD. But that was some time ago and i've not seen one since...!

I had another toilet incident on a SWT service to Waterloo last Saturday, all the toilets on a 3 car 159 were LOOU... >:( As we still had another 45 mins left of the journey, I sought out the Guard and explained that I needed to use a loo as a matter of urgency, and that waiting till arrival into Waterloo was not an option. He opened what was supposively the cleanest toilet for me to use under my own peril... Put it this way, I'm glad I hadn't already eaten my lunch :-X :-\ :o

Nope, when CDL was disengaged the toilets would not flush however I believe this plan was dropped as the electrics on HSts aren't exactly the best.

Tanks are all well and good until you get a stubborn 'deposit', back in my FSR days and direct emission loos on 158s there wasn't much that couldn't be shifted with some courage and a rolled up Metro! I won't go into the trouble I have to go through with a Voyager!

Avoiding breathing in, for a start?  ;D

Lol, well maybe in the past, I really don't think they smell any better or worse than other trains these days, only pong I've notice lately is from where sinks have overflowed and run along the floor to the vestibule carpet. Unfortunately people seem to keep putting toilet paper in the sink clogging the plug hole, subsequent passengers use the sink to wash their hands and eventually the water level gets high enough to register as movement on the sensor and then it keeps flowing until it overflows!

I'm highly impressed with your devotion to duty! I suspect many other guards might be tempted to take one look and lock the bog o.o.u... ;)

PS how on earth do you get rid of the rolled up Metro afterwards?  :o

C/Sgt Bourne, in the film 'Zulu'.  ;)

Lol, in the bin, wet end first!