Are There No Carrier Pigeons?

Private sector efficiency has made itself felt in the provinces, where testimony from a rail company operating somewhere north of Westminster has made an extraordinary committee meeting slightly more extraordinary than was anticipated. Asked about the latest round of delays and cancellations, company officials admitted, in the course of whining that something might be done eventually given sufficient time and incentive, that communications with the expendables who crew their trains are still reliant on fax machines. For readers below a certain age, fax machines were a primitive species of telecommunications device which combined the convenience of a non-mobile telephone with the efficiency of a Steam Age inkjet printer, and which were standard in offices about the time the whining interregnum John Major split up the national railway network and sold it off piecemeal some three decades ago. Apparently any change to digital technology would involve coming to some arrangement with the unions, which is clearly unreasonable; while tree-hugging woke legalism has thus far prevented our public transport élite from having their messages taken back and forth in cleft sticks.