TThere’s not much that Dolly Parton and the head of Northern Rail can claim to have in common. Frustrated commuters from Manchester to Middlesbrough may complain that train services barely run from 9 to 5. What ties them together is that neither can live without their fax machine.

Banned by England’s NHS and banned from the Premier League after too many player transfers failed due to poor communications, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham this week announced that the screeching and buzzing They blamed the constant use of fax machines for making commuting miserable.

After listening to Northern executives explain the service’s dismal performance for half an hour, he thundered: “I heard that you still use fax machines…is that true?”

The bosses admitted that it was. They explained that a quarter of a century after email became popular and 40 years after faxing, in 2024 manning and crew processing is still done by fax. Burnham could hardly believe it. Faxes deliver epic news, such as Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA in 1995 (“I’m back,” he faxed) and archival invitations to Prince William and Duchess Kate’s wedding in 2011. There was a time when it was delivered. But this was a source of embarrassment. Mr Burnham was furious, saying the use of faxes showed “disrespect for the traveling public”.

“It looks like the rail industry will respond once the fax arrives,” he said.

The Science Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington have fax machines in their collections, but Northern is not the only one that continues to use them.

Country superstar Parton refuses to text, sticking to her fax machine even when sending a message to her goddaughter Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus sometimes has someone scan her fax and send it to her via text. Scores of fax machines were still rotating at hospitals in Wales, a response to a Freedom of Information request in 2022 revealed. A survey published in July found that a quarter of companies in Germany still use faxes frequently, and many German hospitals use fax machines. Officials in Japan, who are “fax enthusiasts,” still use them, saying their technology, which turns streams of sound into pulses of ink, lowers the risk of hacking.

Jason Fitzpatrick, who runs the Gadget Museum in Suffolk and has a collection of 40 fax machines, said: “There are computers that have been working since the 1970s, and outdated technology is widely used in places like the Underground. “It’s part of what keeps us going,” he said. It is difficult to extract because it is very complex and custom designed. ‘There are some military systems that are still powered by decades-old computers,” he added.

Approval by fax for railway operators shows the extreme change in today’s technological advancements. This week, Elon Musk claimed that artificial intelligence “will probably be able to do anything that humans can do, probably within the next year or two.” But the rail group, which carries 85 million passengers a year, still relies on technology long since surpassed by computers.

Guardian readers haven’t completely given up on technology either. One person still sends faxes to his aunt, who is over 100 years old.

“Her arthritis makes it difficult for her to type text messages on the small, unwieldy buttons on her cell phone. The same goes for her hearing and phone calls. So we write to each other instead. ,” she said. “We type chatty messages, but she writes by hand in very large letters and uses very few wasted words. Now that most organizations don’t have fax numbers, she feels a little left out. I think you feel it.”

Another reader who works for a power company said, “It’s used as an emergency measure to secure last-minute wholesale energy deals when there’s an internet problem. Women’s lives are threatened.”

In 2018, then Health Secretary Matt Hancock ordered the removal of fax machines from the NHS, calling the technology “outdated” and claiming that “others got rid of their fax machines years ago”. NHS England does not know whether Mr Hancock’s order to “not collect data on the number of fax machines” was followed.

Phil Collins is perhaps one of the most famous fax users ever since he was inaccurately reported to have said via fax in 1996 that he was divorcing his wife.

“I was in Frankfurt and the phone kept dying so I sent a fax,” he told an interviewer in 2016. “I was arranging a time to see the children and I mentioned that fact. [the marriage] It was over, but the fax translated that the relationship with me was over. I don’t know how it got into the newspaper. Well, I think so. I never asked her. ”

Last year, Britain’s telecoms regulator Ofcom announced that British Telecom would no longer be required to provide fax lines. He said this, ringing the death knell for fax machines.

“Unless you’ve moved or are representing a footballer who has actually moved, there may not have been much reason to use a fax in recent years.”

But even football agencies have largely abandoned the use of fax machines, which had the advantage of allowing quick and accurate contract exchanges. The final straw appears to have been the fax glitch that reportedly ruined David de Gea’s move from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2015. The Premier League moved to online registration applications in December 2018.