train lockdown

Living out of the city a fair way, I am unfazed by the fact that I must alight only from the front train carriage because the platform at my country station isn't long enough to accommodate a whole train. Naturally, when I get on the train I walk to the front.
With monotonous regularity all the way home, the driver/guard announces "passengers for the hick towns of x, y and z can only get off from the first carriage" - or something like that anyway.

Today though, there was a new departure. From the moment we got on the train the announcement was different. "New regulations, for your safety, require that from Landsborough onwards all passengers must be in the first 3 carriages". Similar messages were repeated, again and again. I didn't trouble since I was in car 1. Once we passed Landsborough though, the messages got very excited. We were told that the back of the train was in 'lockdown for your safety' - fires, crashes and other incidents that may require us to exit from the rear cars were obviously not a threat to public safety.

Apparently, some idiot had jumped out a train carriage at the rear of the train yesterday at a station with no platform at the rear and sprained a thumb or something...therefore, health and safety decided we needed to be in 'lockdown' - a term I only understand from prison movies. By the time we approached station x - where one needs to 'detrain' (a lovely Queensland expression) from the first carriage only, all the passengers who had thought to sit in carriages 2 or 3 had been herded by the guard into the first carriage - which was full. Standing room only in one carriage, while the empty carriages rode passengerless in case someone was stupid enough to jump off the train from the wrong place.

Now if I had been a H&S executive, I'd have rubbed my hands together at the sprained thumb of the idiot who sprained his thumb, or ankle, or other bodily part and declared to my co-worker "well that's a bit of luck. That'll be a deterrant to those silly buggers who ignore what we say". But no. The reaction was to make the rest of us very uncomfortable and at risk of far greater things, potentially.

Oh well, at least my mobile internet works on the train so I can look at my computer and ignore the standing passengers...