STEVEN Camley's cartoon (December 8) shows our Transport Minister standing on a station platform with a building behind him bearing the prominent sign "Waiting Room". People must be fortunate indeed through in the west.

Here in East Lothian, in the now-remote days of my childhood, Longniddry railway station had a ticket office, toilets, platform benches, and waiting rooms where, incredibly, coal fires burned in cold winter weather.

All this is long gone, and now on the bare, windswept platforms there is only a sort of Perspex bus-shelter containing a ticket machine which is unable to process the concession fares to Edinburgh requested by shambling geriatrics like myself. Other East Lothian stations are similarly spartan or have surviving station buildings kept firmly locked.

Nationalisation anyone?

David Robertson,

47 Forthview Road, Longniddry, East Lothian.