Tag Archives: train

Using form: Odd poem: British Railways toilet sign

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Passengers will please refrain
from flushing toilets while the train
is standing in the station.

*****

It is my (perhaps flawed) understanding that this particular wording originated in the UK. Signs instructing passengers to refrain from flushing toilets while at a station were widely used in the UK throughout the mid-20th century, specifically from the nationalization of British Railways in 1948 through the 1960s. The signs were a standard fixture in passenger carriages, typically made of cast iron or enamel for durability. The signs began to disappear as British Rail modernized its signage in 1965, and gradually replaced older rolling stock with newer models. 

At the time these signs were posted, British trains utilized a “hopper” or “direct discharge” system: toilets consisted of a simple chute or a water-flushed system that emptied human waste directly onto the railway tracks. Because waste dropped straight down, flushing while stationary at a station would deposit raw sewage directly onto the platform-side tracks, creating severe hygiene and odor issues for passengers and staff. Although the first retention tanks (which hold waste for later disposal) were introduced in 1981, the transition away from “hopper” toilets was slow. As recently as 2018, approximately 10% of British train carriages still discharged waste onto tracks, with the practice only largely being eliminated by 2023 after significant government and industry pressure. 

It is not known which railway employee successfully created and implemented the phrasing—”Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station”. Perhaps they did it surreptitiously, anonymously; but the catchy rhythm and rhyme became so ubiquitous that it was set to the tune of Dvořák’s Humoresque No. 7 and became a popular piece of cultural folklore in both the UK and US.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Yale law professor Thurman Arnold take full credit for the “Bawdy Song.” In his autobiography, Go East, Young Man (pp. 171–72), Douglas notes, “Thurman and I got the idea of putting these memorable words to music, and Thurman quickly came up with the musical refrain from Humoresque.” Here is an incomplete version of that work:

“Passengers will please refrain
From flushing toilets while the train
Is in the station. Darling, I love you!
We encourage constipation
While the train is in the station
Moonlight always makes me think of you.
If the woman’s room be taken,
Never feel the least forsaken,
Never show a sign of sad defeat.
Try the men’s room in the hall,
And if some man has had the call,
He’ll courteously relinquish you his seat.
If these efforts all are vain,
Then simply break a window pane-
This novel method used by very few.
We go strolling through the park
Goosing statues in the dark,
If Sherman’s horse can take it, why can’t you?”

Maryann Corbett, ‘Lament for the Midnight Train’

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Night-train noises, muffled and low,
nights when the Northern Limited left.
Midnights, we’d hear its strange chord blow,
a distant dissonance, treble-cleft.
Languid in summer, dulled in snow,
it spoke to me calmly: Trust and rest.
The night world works on a steady clock.
The barges ride on the river’s crest;
at port in Duluth, the grain ships dock,
and a streetlamp lit at the end of the block
looks in at the window’s blind from the west–

I never learned: Did the schedule skew
departure times into daylight hours,
or did neighbors grouse, as neighbors do,
that living close to a loud sound sours
tempers and lives? I never knew,
but it’s not there now, though we still see track.
The freeway sound and the freeway grime
color the nights. The snow turns black,
and the block club frets over rising crime,
and the sweet illusion of changeless time,
though I wish for it fiercely, will not come back.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “When I wrote this poem, I was still participating on online poetry boards. I recall that there was a certain amount of argument about what a train–horn or whistle?–actually sounds like. The disappearance of the nightly sound has, in fact, a prosaic explanation: the schedule did change, and the station itself was moved to a downtown location. The name of the train route is fictional, chosen for alliterative purposes.”

‘Lament for the Midnight Train’ was first published in The Times (UK, online); appeared in the chapbook ‘Dissonance’; and is collected in ‘Street View’.

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Photo: “The Midnight Train To Georgia….” by tvdflickr is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Poem: “The Train Will Stop”

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“The train will stop for ten minutes at the next station.
If you wish to make this your annual vacation,
please reboard in nine minutes.” The travellers gaze
at the countryside slowing past, consider ways
to take more than nine minutes for a break
but, looking down a slight curve in the track,
see no way to get out and back
nor a real reason they should take
the risk. The train will go…
and what else do they know?
They’ll stay till dropped
at some end stop.
Descend.
The end.

This little piece of existential angst appears in the current Bewildering Stories. It was written, submitted and accepted long before the current Covid-19 crisis came along, which it in no way relates to. In fact, in the awareness that we are all mortal and that everyone’s journey will have an end stop regardless, you might even say this suggests that in the Grand Scheme of Things the Covid-19 situation is trivial. The bigger issue is: eventually we all die. A solution to that would be far more dramatic than a successful Coronavirus vaccine.

Technically? Not a tightly formed poem – the initial lines are straggly, but as they shorten they tighten into iambics. The rhymes too are erratic, mostly in couplets but not quite. Not a perfect poem. Flippantly you could ask, In the Grand Scheme of Things and in the present circumstances, why should this matter? And the answer is, The level of artistic quality always matters; ultimately, it’s the most you can hope to achieve and be remembered by.