If you’ve ever left your bag, your phone, or your prosthetic limb on a Sydney train or the platform of one of our maze-like stations, you’re not alone.
People leave a staggering 50,000 items on trains and stations per year, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. That’s about 136 items of lost property per day – but it’s the specific items that piqued our interest.
Along with the aforementioned prosthetic limb, the personal belongings that have made their way into Sydney Trains’ lost property bank include $7,500 in cash left by one forgetful (or excessively wealthy) passenger in 2016, letters from Buckingham Palace, and an average of 30 to 40 mobile phones every day.
As entertaining as it may be to imagine coming across a letter from the King on your way to Wolli Creek, being the owner of said misplaced items is a little less fun.
Thankfully, Sydney Trains has developed a pretty thorough lost property process, and passengers are generally reunited with their abandoned possessions in a matter of hours. When Sydney Trains chief executive Matt Longland left his phone on a train, for instance, it was returned to him within 30 minutes.
If items are unclaimed, they’re kept in storage and then auctioned off – with the funds raised being poured back into the public transport system for improvements (see Redfern Station’s recent revamp). The Sydney Trains team are also investigating charity partnerships to generate more positive impact from the forgetful travellers among us.