Q. "How much did the Pride paint job on that train cost?" - A. "We won't tell you because you don't believe that TWAW"

[Another2Cats]

Yes, this actually happened.

It's quite a long story but the TL;DR is just as in the title.

I follow someone on Twitter @ MouseInTheCourt and they tweeted about this earlier today.

The East Coast Main Line is the route that runs from London Kings Cross up to Edinburgh. It used to be run by Virgin Trains but they couldn't make it work so the route was returned to government control and a new, government owned, body called LNER was set up.

(totally irrelevant, they just copied the name of the company that used to own the route from 1923 to 1948 - ironically, that company, one of the "Big Four" was also set up by the government under the Railways Act 1921).

Anyway, last year LNER released a press release saying that they were going to have a train painted specially in "Pride" colours.

Together For a Summer Of Pride: LNER Launches Azuma Train Celebrating Pride

A few months later someone requested information about the process and costs of decorating a train in Pride colours. She also asked about the processes for selecting train designs more generally and about plans for future designs.

Since LNER is owned by the Department for Transport and so is a public body, this was done by way of an FOI (Freedom of Information) request.

LNER said that it did not hold the information requested. The woman then put the case that a significant sum of money had been spent and it was therefore odd that there appeared to be no paper trail explaining how the decision had been made.

LNER then trawled through her social media posts and suddenly declared that she was "vexatious".

Their reason for doing this was that, among other similar complaints, her tweets:

"... indicates a possible intent to challenge or disrupt initiatives related to transgender inclusion and to promote a binary view of sex and gender."

Her position was then given as follows:

16. The complainant accepted that she had a binary view of sex, but she argued that this was a protected belief – as determined by the Employment Appeal Tribunal in the Forstater case. The public authority had therefore, in her view, unlawfully discriminated against her because it had refused to provide information, that she would otherwise have been entitled to receive, due to her beliefs.

17 She was unhappy that the public authority had conducted a trawl of her social media postings before completing its review. She argued that it was unfair for the public authority to restrict her right to access information simply because she had used her social media accounts to promote her own beliefs – beliefs which she is entitled to hold. More generally she considered it unreasonably restrictive for a public authority to grant or withhold information based on its opinion of the requester’s social media postings. Nor was it reasonable for the public authority to expect her to shift her entire system of beliefs in order to access information.

[...]

19 The public authority’s original press release had highlighted its “commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives for colleagues, customers and communities throughout the year.” There was, she argued, a public interest in understanding why the public authority had chosen this particular cause ahead of other worthy causes, what the decision-making process was and what plans it had to celebrate other causes in future.
.

Not surprisingly, the ICO came down on the side of this woman.

Full judgment here (pdf):

https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKICO/2024/305669.pdf

”But the fact that ways round barriers have to be found,”

This.

Adults who are over a certain age should be able to access public services independently. Adults who are disabled should be able to access public services independently. Adults who have a mild intellectual impairment should be able to access public services independently.

If public services are being delivered in a way that means that groups of citizens aren’t even able to access ticket-purchasing facilities, then it’s an exclusionary service and the self-important, self-aggrandising, self-identified “equality and inclusion leads” need to start focusing their efforts on sorting that out, not on boasting about decorations and slogans, nor on scolding and insulting passengers.

£58 grand for one train? WTAF??

Once the railways are renationalised surely this kind of waste of money will be jumped upon and ridiculed?

This is a nationalist company. That was why it was possible to do a FOI.

An embarrassingly extravagant waste of funds that could have been put to so many other purposes that could have genuinely improved the service. I am appalled.

nationalist company

Nationalised company

Train tickets are a bloody joke.. too many ticket options, very confusing with too many rules.
Ticket offices closed, meaning people have to use those machines, and some people struggle to use them.

The government encourages people to use trains / public transport but don’t seem to grasp how difficult it is for some people.

Is it too much to ask to actually have a human being at a train station?

So many disabled people can’t use the railway network in the way other passengers can because there isn’t sufficient staff training or functioning lifts or even ramps at every station, yet this railway franchise spaffs £58K on decorating a feckin train. That money could have been better put towards the shortfall in provision for passengers with physical disabilities.

Virtue signalling like this is a complete waste of money and a total distraction from working on actually helping people who can’t use the services without assistance.

Transactivists have absolutely nowhere to go put poor me.

It doesn't wash for most people anywhere, but it's certainly won't wash with train users when they realise it's because LNER have spent £60k on painting a rainbow on a train.

Just told this story to DP and I won't repeat what he said!

I use LNER almost every week, as it’s our local service. I regularly have to claim back on journeys that were late/ didn’t happen and the seat reservation system is appalling. Once they dumped a train-load of people who were meant to be going to London at Peterborough for no very good reason. During the strikes, they cancelled so many trains but failed to stop passengers from those trains forcing their way on to the few remaining services, with the result that anyone who had booked a ticket on those services couldn’t get on their train. I will always remember looking down the platform at those who missed out because they didn’t have the physical strength to push their way on to the trains - there was us (with a young child) several older women, a young mum with a baby in her arms and a family with their dad in a wheelchair. The only LNER staff member on duty was yelling at us to step away from the train as it was due to depart without us, even though we all had tickets. They are the very last company in the world who should be talking about inclusivity.

I used the LNER online 'delay repay' system to claim compensation for a very severely delayed and monumentally expensive journey. It confirmed acceptance of my claim but there is now zero record of it and the compensation never arrived.
Fucking disaster. An absolutely astonishing price for long-distance tickets, but with few of the protections that you would have for much cheaper airline tickets. Completely absurd that their customer relations initiatives should focus on a group of people that LNER apparently views as needing constant celebration in order to survive. Instead of focusing on, well, customer relations - building a workable ticketing system that can be clearly summarised by someone other than Franz Kafka.

Any AI or other artists moved to immortalise this scene? This rail line (and all others) need to see what their preaching of inclusivity while practicing virtue signalling looks like.

I know this is slightly off-topic Albert but I too have had this happen, albeit with a different (albeit equally incompetent) train company, so when I make Delay Repay claims I now take photos/screenshots of the crucial stages, so I can show them hard evidence should they come back and tell me my claim has been 'lost'. It’s mighty convenient to them if they can avoid paying out what can be 100% in compensation, and as you say the tickets often cost an arm and a leg.

I claim for everything I'm entitled to, and I don’t let it drop; I make them pay it even if it’s only a couple of pounds. It’s also some way of making up for the dozens and dozens of smaller but constant delays and problems (Byzantine ticketing system, perma-closed ticket office, massively crowded trains, run-down stations with no waiting rooms in wet weather etc etc) that don’t qualify for compensation but which grind you down relentlessly as a train traveller.

Had a go. AI is not the most reliable reporter – there are several images of people standing on the roof of the train as well, but these three are quite good.

Excellent! Just need someone to tweet them to LNER!

How dare they spend public money like this? So glad this woman was successful

So...

AI spat it's dummy out at any reference to trains with a sufragette flag and ab engine plaque saying "TERF" and refused to generate anything. Changed to colours and terf and got the image below. to be fair when I asked for it to depict a progress pride flag on a train, with the engine bearing a plaque that says "LGBTQ+" it didn't particularly want to play ball with that either!

Slightly off on a tangent here, but on the checking social media aspect of this, years ago I made a complaint to a hospital and then discovered they had trawled social media looking for me as the Facebook account I had that had nothing on it, set up in the name of a bloke living in a different location to where I actually lived, (using an email that wasn't my usual one but one Facebook had obviously linked to my actual name) kept suggesting a woman who worked in the complaints department of the hospital I had complained to as a suggested person I might wish to follow, so she'd searched online for me prior to dealing with my complaint. I knew that was what she'd done as the only other recommendations that came up as suggested accounts to follow were previous shags of mine that had also obviously done some internet stalking.

None of these public sector organisations are to be trusted to just answer the questions asked of them without stalking the person asking questions it seems!

Found a workaround for the TERFy train

Niiiice!

Thanks Boiled 🙂

I am a taxpayer. I know that painting a single delivery lorry cost my supermarket employers £1,500 back in 1998, so I can only guess at the money wasted on a 15-20 carriage train on the LNER.

Now it is possible that the train needed its routine coat of paint, but somehow I doubt it.
I would also want to know how much time and effort to invade this woman's privacy, and how much for the litigation.
Then I would like to be reassured that the person who authorised this activity was able to justify the cost of the re-paint. AND the person who authorised the witch hunt was actually sacked for wasting money when a quick phone call and a £40 reply was all that was needed.

Excellent work @inkymoose.

Although if LNER were to go all terfy all over the trains i'd feel conflicted. Part of me would be delighted, but it would still be a waste of money that should be better spent reducing fares or improving the service for all their customers.

Not that it's likely to be a conflict I'll be forced to wrestle with anytime soon or ever.

Jeez, I wonder what salary they are on, and what actual practical measures they have put in place to make train travel more inclusive to the groups who are excluded from access to reliable, affordable, convenient & safe train travel?

About the Facebook stalky thing… (apologies to the pp I can’t remember who you are and I’m on the app and it is glitching every time I try to scroll up - won’t let me past the terfy train)

i will confess that if I got a real stonker of an interesting question (like, er.. maybe how many lamp posts are the on streets with an r in the name that were cleaned on a Thursday by a bloke named Dave ) or if it was a topic that tingled the spidey senses, I would have a quick check of LinkedIn or a Google to see if it was a journalist.

Not that journalists are a problem, but i noticed that if a journalist is writing an article they might come back with several more related FoIs and if I’m trawling the database anyway I might as well pull out all the info relating Dave and his mate Bert, who did the traffic light polishing on Wednesdays. and also let colleagues in the media team know that they might want to get a briefing on the topic.

but yeah, stalking Facebook from your own account is an amateur move.