a turd class compartment, please

Ah, the golden age of rail. Steam, separate compartments, porters lugging your numerous valises and portmanteaux onto the train for you, the dining car, dastardly Russian double agents drinking red wine with fish, the swines, Jenny Agutter waving her knickers at you, the tart, everyone on the entire train taking turns to stab you to death, the bastards. Great days. Also, all that business about not using the toilet while the train is in the station; I mean, good lord, the days when you could just dump the contents of the train toilet directly onto the tracks. Imagine!

Except, apparently, unbelievably, that still happens. I was regaled only this week with a charming tale of a train pulling out of Newport station, on which someone had evidently just indulged in some ill-timed transit of solids and flushing thereof, resulting in the evidence of their defecatory endeavours being deposited, coiled and glistening, on the tracks as the train departed. Yes, unbelievably it is still legal to fling turds from a moving train into the British countryside, as long as a) you do it via the designated and certified turd-flinging chute and b) you do it while the train is in motion so that the solids hit the track at 70+ miles per hour and are therefore pulverised into a fine spray of warm shit. I do find it utterly extraordinary that this is still legal - I should caveat that by saying that it's probably not legal to build new trains with such primitive plumbing arrangements; the new Virgin trains have something much more closely resembling an airline toilet, and which presumably involves some sort of internal storage tank. The older-style trains (the ones old fogeys like me still call "InterCity trains") still use the just-fling-it-on-the-tracks approach, though. I can see the argument that converting the old rolling stock would be expensive and disruptive and that it's probably better, on balance, to let the old trains be phased out and replaced rather than do a refit, but it's still mildly extraordinary to me that it is in some circumstances OK to throw liquidised raw sewage around the British countryside. And yet when I drop my trousers and curl one down on the lawn at Windsor Castle I get an ASBO. It's political correctness gone mad.