Wednesday 1 July 2009

A good time to keep your head down.

With NR's bonus story still bubbling away in the background you'ld have thought that the infrastructure owner would have advised staff to keep a low profile today.

Not so.

Nigel Harris was spotted on the apron outside Kings Cross station this morning attempting to do a piece to camera on NXEC's collapse for Sky News.

Enter stage left officious looking NR cove in blue 'hi-vi'.

"Oi", he said, "you can't do that here. You have to move outside NR's boundary".

Where upon he waved his hand at some unmarked and indeterminate point some 18 inches away.

Harris and co duly complied

Not 10 minutes later when Harris was about to do a similar piece with ITV the NR jobsworth hove into view again.

Alas. Harris was a mere quarter of an inch over the illusory line leaving blue vest man to scowl before he slunk off to bother someone else.

As Nigel is renowned for his long memory expect NR to get an extra special kicking in the next issue of Rail.

UPDATE: Captain Deltic notes

When I was doing one of my rare TV interviews outside Kings Cross and was moved on a while back, the jobsworth was able to point to brass studs in the pavement to mark the boundary of the Coucher spread.

Nigel should think himself lucky they didn't call for Victoria!!

UPDATE: This from NR's Internet Rapid Rebuttal Unit...

Spare a thought for our hardworking station staff.

Their primary role is to help passengers at stations and on days like today where the world's media have descended on King's Cross (for a story that is not about Network Rail), you can forgive a few short tempers.


We make every effort to accommodate reasonable media access at our stations but when we get overstretched sometimes we will have to push people beyond the boundary.

Welcome back PJ - it's been lonely without you. And also to Eye's other NR readers. Glad to see that the soggy bit of string has been plugged back into the interweb.