Recently, I stumbled upon this sign in an Illinois antique shop my wife and I were hunting. Made of stainless steel, it is vintage, probably from a 1940s or 1950s passenger train coach. This sort of sign would have been a common bathroom sight on trains of that era (or even later) in the United States and other countries.
I had to have that sign! It kindled flashbacks to my long train ride , with hundreds of other Boy Scouts, from LaGrange, Illinois to the 1953 Jamboree in what is now Irvine , California. Boys will be boys, of course. Long train rides can be boring at times. Accordingly, signs such these became invitations rather than prohibitions. Many a flush occurred in stations along the way, much to great juvenile joy. But wait, as they say on many TV commercials. The really great fun happened when a coach was standing over a highway as the rest of the train was in a station. The sign said nothing about flushing over a road crossing. A flush over a highway produced an effect similar to the sight of a person leaving a bathroom with paper stuck to a shoe--only in this case, it was stuck to tires.
Passenger train toilets at that time essentially had straight pipes directly to the tracks. As a result, tracks tended to become above ground septic systems. In our travels to England in the 1980s and 90s, I recall standing on local station platforms gazing on toilet debris on the tracks--not a welcoming experience. But for people on the platform, the site simply was unpleasant. For railroad workers, who walked, inspected and repaired the rails, it must have been just awful.
Today, presumably, passenger trains in the United states and most countries, collect bathroom waste into tanks below the coaches. So, another tradition gives way to modernity. And, a sign becomes an antique and only flushes a memory. Maybe I will hang it in our bathroom and see what happens.
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