Do Internal Train Doors Attack You?

I have to ask, how many train doors have assaulted you in your life? Not the outside, on/off the train doors but the glass automatic variety that separate the vestry from the main carriage. You see, a few years back one of those closed on me and pinned me into the frame until I shrugged it off and it made a sickening crunch and drooped off to one side. It took three of us much rush hour lifting and bonding to force it open wide enough for our laptop bags to get through. Today, I approached a similar door, pressed the little open button and nothing happened. So I pressed it again and still nothing. So I gave it a gentle slide and it opened a bit so I walked through only for the bugger to slide shut, like it was avenging it's mother from a few years ago. Another shrug of my shoulders, another nauseating crunch, another door hanging limp and in need of much shifting to open. Is it just me? Did I once sleep with a train door's wife?

I always found the old style outside on/off doors hugely challenging... The ones you had to dangle outside the door to wrestle the door handle... Which was always a stiff b*stard to budge... I always got very apprehensive on busy trains when I was at the front of the queue and on door opening duties... Many years ago I was in this exact position on Bridgend... After several seconds of panicky door knob wrestling (which felt like hours) I put my weight behind the door to get the fecking thing to open... The door flew open... And I glided effortlessly and silently still hanging in the window... I arced over the platform with passengers waiting to get looking bewildered until I hit my head on the side of the train... I fell in a crumpled heap... I picked myself off and walked off with as much dignity as I could muster (a bit like Alec Guiness leaving 'The Cooler' in Bridge over the river Kwai).... with a smallish circle of locomotive grime on my forehead... To a chorus of muffled and not so muffled laughter

I used to feckin dread those doors as well Trash.
NEVER be close to the door at your scheduled stop, or you'll be the mug wrestling to open it!

Forget walking on the moon; mankind's greatest venture is developing the train door that opens from the inside.

I invariably have trouble with lift doors - they open wide maintaining a casual air of innocence, and as soon as I step across the threshold they execute a speedy guillotine manoeuvre (accompanied, I fancy, by some Vincent Price maniacal laughter). Then, when they've been beaten back and I enter its lair and press the button for the desired destination, the doors will remain motionless for ages before reluctantly and sulkily responding.

G-ster wrote:I used to feckin dread those doors as well Trash.
NEVER be close to the door at your scheduled stop, or you'll be the mug wrestling to open it!

Forget walking on the moon; mankind's greatest venture is developing the train door that opens from the inside.

It was a very serene moment in my life... No noise... Just flight... Like Peter Pan with fairy dust and the joy of belief... But in my case the grim rictus of reality that I was a mechanical floating wanker.... and the never ending shame of my 3 second journey of misery on a British Railway door... My mates said if I'd been a Super Hero I would have been called the 'Door Knob' fighting injustice by making everyone else feel better about themselves

I feel like the Hanna Barbera narrator delivering to Penelope Pitstop the Hooded Claw is at large portent when I tell you those doors you fear are still alive and well in 21st Century Britain. In fact you can't travel on First Great Western between Cardiff and London without having to do battle with those exceptionally deep and treacherous door latches that have outlived every other disastrous Seventies design.

Trains are b*stards... That is all