Jacob Christensen

It all began … oh, never mind: The point is “we have been in office for eight years and nothing is our fault“.

I see the queue to the washing-basin beginning to form.

Okay, in case you have no idea what I’m talking about: The Danish railways desperately needs more and more modern trains as well as a signalling system which does not predate the invention of the transistor. In the meantime, the DSB’s commissioning of new trainsets has gone seriously off the rails – the all-new and Italian-engineered class MGs should have been introduced in back in 2003 and formed the backbone of long-distance services by now – and in the meantime passenger trains break down on an almost hourly basis.

One word of advice would be: Never, ever take the InterRegio-trains between Copenhagen and Aarhus. You see, there are no locomotives west of the Great Belt these days¹ so if – that is: when – the locomotive breaks down, passengers are stuck.

But perhaps the DSB is learning what happens if by coincidence you have a journalist abord a train which has stopped in the middle of nowhere: DSB is short for a##, DSB’s steaming, With the benefit of hindsight.

On a personal note: I’ve tried just about everything during my years travelling through much of Europe by train – don’t get me started: I could open a blog just covering those experiences – and while travelling in general has been endlessly more comfortable during the last twenty years, it is true that train toilets are less reliable today (closed systems always break down) and just as nice air-conditioning is when it works, just as uncomfortable a coach with a broken or shut ventilation system gets.

Correction: The MG story is even sadder than I remembered. The trains should have been introduced in ordinary traffic in 2003 and fully commissioned by 2006. And so, delivery has been delayed more than six years by now. It is one of the biggest scandals in the history of Danish transport.

1. In fact, there are. But they belong to goods companies and are of no use for passenger trains [↩]

Yes, indeed. Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the UK general election of 1979.

As we all know, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher won the election with 43,9 per cent of the vote giving the party 53,4 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons and managed to stay in office until 1997.

What spooks me is that I actually remember the UK having a Labour government, industrial unrest and a really cheap pound. Back in 1976-77, London was in fact a very popular holiday destination for Danes because of the shopping opportunities (remember that Denmark devalued the krone on endless occasions until 1981). I also remember following Thatcher’s fall on BBC in late 1990 – I had just moved to a flat with cable-TV and watching foreign news broadcasts was still very exotic. And then there was the crazy night in 1997 when New Labour more or less wiped out the Tories in general and the Tory front bench in particular.

One final observation: Despite – or perhaps because of – the political and social changes in the UK since the 1970s, Thatcher introduced a succession of prime ministers with very long terms in office. Thatcher would serve for 10 1/2 years, John Major for 6 1/2 and Tony Blair for a little over 10 years. Chances are that Gordon Brown will only make it to three years – but in politics you never know.