VW towing kit

For some years I owned a VW Jetta turbo diesel. Lovely car, too.

(It did have the cheating engine management software, but that's another story. I and most Australian VW owners with those engines decided not to have the performance, economy and possibly even engine life of our vehicles compromised by the "upgrade" we were offered to make our vehicles comply with emission standards which didn't even apply to them.) 

It had been owned by my late father since new. And in good faith, he had bought, new out of the showroom, the medium-duty towbar complete with the Bosch computer interface.

It's a brilliant bit of kit... and so it should be for $400. It speaks to the car's computers. And if your left-hand brake light on the trailer is blown, you get a message in the VW Information System telling you exactly which globe is blown, and which filament of it. Nice.

Until...

I bought a trailer with LED tail lights, turn indicators, the lot. Now, as LED lights had been out for some years, and this was a state-of-the-art towing kit, and the car itself has LED tail, brake and turn lights, you'd expect it to be able to tow a trailer with LED lights too, would you not?

And you'd be wrong. The trailer lights all just strobe (that's how it tells whether it's right or left tail or brake lamp that is blown... it sends a pulse down the circuit and sees which turn indicator circuit is closer to the fault). 

The car is registered and legal. The trailer is registered and legal. That's another interesting thing... somebody got paid to write the design rules that allowed these incompatible vehicles to be approved. Somebody also gets paid to keep them up to date. I guess that means they take care of the colour of the printed rules, make them nice and pretty, because nobody seems to care much about the content. This problem has been documented on the Internet for many years now. It's common to many makes that use Bosch electrics.

But the primary responsibility is with the manufacturers who produced such a ridiculously flawed vehicle. Somebody got paid to design that computer interface. Whether they even looked at the car is doubtful. As I said above, the car itself has LED tail lights, brake lights, and turn indicators.

Towing safety - if you have such a vehicle, please read this.   

Sydney-Melbourne express train

Some years ago, I caught the Melbourne-Sydney XPT train. These trains run both during the day and overnight in both directions.

Overnight, these trains had compartments that sleep two passengers on an upper and lower bunk. These cabins were in pairs either side of a very compact bathroom providing a shower and toilet. During the day, the bunks fold away, and each compartment seats three passengers side by side, giving an aisle seat, a middle seat and a window seat, one of the pair of cabins facing in the direction of travel and the other one the opposite. I had carefully reserved the window facing in the direction of travel.

Shortly before departure the occupants of the other seats turned up, an elderly couple. They didn't introduce themselves but they did smile. As we left, it was obvious that the husband was trying his best to see out the window. So I offered to swap seats and sit on the aisle, and that brought more smiles, quite warm ones in fact. But it meant that I was now facing the passenger in the facing compartment, an elderly lady, and she was not far away so I quickly gathered that the facing compartment was occupied by three elderly ladies travelling together. Again no introductions (Australians are not good at such things) but friendly smiles.

But then one of those three ladies used the toilet. We could all hear absolutely everything.

Shortly afterwards the lady sitting opposite me began to look uncomfortable. I guessed why, and suggested to the man now occupying my seat "There's a buffet car just two carriages ahead of us, why don't we go there for a coffee?" He said "Maybe later". His wife said firmly "George, just go." We went. On the way I told George of my reasons and he readily agreed with them.

As we returned to our seats, George's wife was standing and the four ladies were in animated conversation, and I distinctly heard one of them say "Ridiculous!" Without anything more needing to be said we adopted a code... whichever lady was sitting opposite me would cough loudly, George and I would exchange looks and depart for the buffet. On one of these occasions the lady then in the aisle seat (they swapped around a bit) said "Can I buy you two gentlemen a sandwich?" and we declined but stayed a bit longer that time, guessing that this was the real message.      

Elderly people such as these should be an obvious market for environmentally friendly rail transport. But they need to do better than that.