A closer look
Ah, the romance of classic rail travel: fine dining, scenic landscapes, and spraying human waste across the countryside at sixty miles per hour. For over a century, train toilets were elegantly simple 'hopper' systems—which is a polite way of saying they were just holes in the floor. Whenever nature called, the result was immediately jettisoned directly onto the wooden railroad ties below. It wasn't until the 1990s that most railway networks finally adopted sealed retention tanks, ending the era of literal crap-shoots along the world's railways.
