| Ooh, I have a relevant story that I've never shared before. I was living in Kazakhstan for a while and had to take the overnight train to Kyrgyzstan for a visa run. They're very old trains. I woke up around 3am and had to use the restroom. The train had just stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere, and it was the middle of winter. I went to the restroom. I flushed. But when I looked down through the toilet, I saw snow and train tracks. These trains didn't have anything to collect waste, they just flushed straight onto the ground. I immediately heard some loud whistles and shouting, and footsteps. I rushed back to the bed and hoped that no-one saw me, but it was too late, and then we spent the next 30 minutes talking to soldiers. I wasn't sure if they were asking for extra money, or if it was something we needed to pay anyway because we were crossing the border. It was a tiny train station in the middle of nowhere, and we had no SIM cards, so I started thinking about what we would do if they kicked us off the train. I was actually kind of excited about the idea of building an igloo and sleeping there overnight, and then going to get some help in the morning. That would have been a better story, but in the end they just let us go. So don't flush any ex-soviet train toilets when you're stopped at a station in Central Asia. |
Not just ex-Soviet trains, British ones too. Newer and renovated trains have sewage tanks, but older trains flush directly onto the tracks (and often therefore have a sign in the toilet asking you not to flush when stopped at a station). According to the BBC, as of 2015 this applied to about 10% of the trains in service: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-30541015
The tabloids periodically have a field day with it when people notice again that these trains are still not quite phased out. E.g. in 2014, there was a minor sensation about the quantity of "fertiliser" on the tracks producing tomato growth: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/trains-dump-much-human-...