Given all of the Terminal 5 shenanigans, there’ve been many comments in the past week about the contrast to the St Pancras refurbishment, “on time and on budget” – well true in outline, but many months after the site opened, they have still not managed to put one single cash machine into the whole complex.
“Who knows?” said the woman on the Thameslink info desk, rolling her eyes, when I asked on the weekend when they were likely to arrive. “Everyone’s asking for them.”
Not so odd really – when you arrive at an international train terminal, you expect to be able to get cash.
And the taxi rank is still operating in “temporary facilities”, which means there’s either a long queue of cabs, or a long queue of people, but never both … this being a classic case of more order producing only chaos – the single line of cabs moving hardly at all when there are passengers. Hopefully when they finally manage to open the real facility it will be of a form that will join people to cabs a little more rapidly.
But lest you should think that this is only a British disease, in Australia they’ve designed a new underground train – just not allowed any time for it to stop at stations.
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