The Station With No Name

Today's print edition of Gazeta Wyborcza carried an uncompromising article about the couldn't-care-less attitude of the Polish state railway PKP to its passengers. Here's my little local contribution to the gripe; W-wa Dawidy station (below). This must be the only regularly-used station in Warsaw, maybe in the whole of Poland, maybe in the whole of the European Union, which doesn't have a SINGLE sign indicating where you are.

I've mentioned this before; this is entirely pitiable. W-wa Jeziorki has but one (almost as useless when you bear in mind that the commuter trains using these stations are over 125m / 425ft long). Stations should have at least three large nameboards so that passengers can easily notice where they are.

The uselessness of the shelters can be seen from the fact that there's a uniform layer of snow all around them. Glass has long gone, two-thirds of the seating has been destroyed. Compare with this photo of Castle Bar Park station in West London, a similar distance from the centre of the capital city. This happens to be a branch line, while W-wa Dawidy is on the main Warsaw-Radom-Kielce-Kraków line, serving 72 trains a weekday. Castle Bar Park serves 64 a weekday, and just two-car sets (rather than the three or six car sets that serve Dawidy).

Below: Look at the standard to which this station (the nearest to my parents' house) is maintained. (Click on image to enlarge.) Two fully-glazed shelters; six station name-signs; four loudspeakers for passenger announcements; a help-point, indicator boards conveying the destination and due time of the next train; a ticket office manned during rush-hours; a bus stop facilitating multi-modal transport. W-wa Jeziorki has a bus stop and one name-board, W-wa Dawidy has neither. Castlebar Park shows the standard that PKP PLK SA (the infrastructure operator) has the meet if Poland is to have European-class rail transport.

Over the past 20 years, Poland's railways have inched from the 1950s to the 1960s. There's still a vast amount of catching up to do. The most important is to start running the railways for the benefit of its passengers (or 'customers' as they are now infuriatingly called in the UK!) and not for the railway workers and their unions. Timetables should reflect the working day of the average commuter, and not that desired by the train crews.

The whole point of the EU's structural and cohesion funds is to ensure that similar standards of infrastructure exist across the European Union, for the good of all its citizens. While some upgrading can be seen using EU funds (Warsaw to Łódź, Berlin to Moscow corridor, new rolling stock), Warsaw's suburban stations are as dismal as they ever were.