Best station garden?

The plants growing at Bletchley leave me wondering if perhaps London Midland is trying to win some kind of award.  Once upon a time the vegetation was restricted to hanging baskets and perhaps the odd-well placed pot or two, but at our home station this year we seem to be going for the seriously natural look:

< The north end of platform 3 (arrival platform for trains from London).  To be fair, the ramp down to the trackbed has been covered in weeds for some time, but this is a walkway used by staff and there is surface cabling in this area.





The north end of platforms 4-5 (main platforms for London bound trains).  Here the vegetation is concentrated mostly up the central drainage culvert but there's also weeds growing in the gaps between the stone slabs and the tarmac surface close to the platform edge >

< Platform 6 (Bletchley-Bedford trains).  This is the worst platform for the weeds which now appear to be approaching knee height in places.

What must the staff who man the station think of this?  It must be difficult to take pride in your job and your station when your management is happy to have it in this kind of state. 

Even if London Midland and Network Rail don't care about the views of their staff and passengers, it's surprising to see these weeds allowed to grow on the platform given the railway industry's obsession with health & safety.  Regardless of whether anyone could trip on them or not, they are growing into structures which in places must be riddled with electrical cables and pipework.  

Is it stretching the imagination too far to wonder if one day that the 'signalling problem in the Bletchley area' that delays the trains might be caused by the slow-growing roots of a weed?

No one seems able to remember the platforms being in this state any other year, so there's an assumption that whatever weedkiller used to be used has been banned.  I don't know if that's the case or not, but one person armed with a hoe, shovel and a wheelbarrow could clear the main platform areas of the stuff that's above ground in a morning.  The roots would be left so the weeds would be back, but at least the growth would be stemmed.

See also:

• Network Rail on managing vegetation