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Every time more than an inch of snow falls on London, the questions
are the same. How come we can send a spacecraft to Venus or write the Bible
on a microchip yet remain incapable of operating a sophisticated transportation
network when the temperature drops just a few degrees below zero? Now there’s
a new twist: how come we can known when a missile is even threatening to
fall on Tel Aviv or Riyadh or Dharan, yet remain ignorant of when the next
train will leave Waterloo station – or where it is heading?

Philosophers of technolgoy talk of a communications revolution. Satellites
and cellular telephones allow us to converse instantaneously from a London
street to the Australian outback. Yet somehow the message has still to get
through to British Rail that the communication of travel information is
no longer a luxury, to be fed in titbits to grateful passengers. Information
is now easy to come by; it should be distributed equally liberally, particularly
to those who have a right to know.

To be fair, some British Rail employees do their best to inform. Others
merely shrug off questions with ‘your guess is as good as mine.’ And still
others remain discretely silent – the last resort of those with power over
the microphone button. Meanwhile, those of us deprived of information struggle
on as best we can to make sense of a technological world which – despite
Francis Bacon’s promise that modern science would make man ‘the master and
prossessor of nature’ – has once again amazed us with its vulnerability.