Austrian Federal Railways still have several hundred cars without automatic doors in service
Virtually all the trains here just had manual doors when I used to ride British Railways as a kid. I haven't been on a train for many years (except subways), but I think almost all of the new stock now in use has automatic doors, or at least semi-automatic (press a button to open the door, but it won't work until the driver/conductor turns on a master key).
Usually the conductor patrols the train after every stop and checks the doors, but they're never locked, only closed.
Just how it used to be here. And back in the 1970s somebody arriving late and seeing the train just starting to pull away could even make a dash for it, open a door and climb inside as it was gathering speed, often assisted by the station porter who would run alongside and make sure the door was shut behind him. That's impossible now, of course.
Those cars are great anyway... the windows slide almost all the way down, letting in cool air,
We had similar windows here on the doors, so on a hot day you could open the window right down and get a cool breeze. Now I think about it some more, I seem to recall that in the very last years of service of the old cars they disconnected the internal door handles on some of the faster trains so that you had to open the window and reach out to the outside handle to open the door.
Looking at the trains running today, it seems that the only opening windows on some are tiny fold out panels up high.
the seats are thick dark red plush... pure 1950ies! And lovely to ride too, most modern railway cars are uncomfortable comparedd to those old cars.
Even the subway cars of yesteryear seemed more comfortable to me. One of the lines I used to ride regularly when I was young was running with the old London Underground 1959 stock, and another had the then almost-new 1973 stock.
IMHO, both of those were far better than the cars they have running today.
