Plans to repurpose these rusty old trains isn’t even a bad joke. Where’s the focus on decent rail services in northern England?

I t was one of those press releases so silly I had check I wasn’t about to fall for some ridiculous prank: could the department for transport (DfT) really be heralding an “exciting” new plan to offer northern towns the chance to bid for a knackered old Pacer train to turn into “a community space, cafe or new village hall”?

I refreshed my browser, checked the URL didn’t include the second level domain joke.uk, and gasped. It was real. Rail minister Andrew Jones really had said: “Through this competition we can ensure that the Pacer can be transformed to serve a community near where it carried passengers in an entirely different way. What we need now are creative and exciting proposals from the public, alongside ideas from businesses keen to support this competition, as we say goodbye to Pacers on our railway.”

Jones, whose government has cut council budgets so dramatically that they will have lost almost 60p in the £1 for local services in the decade to 2020, was actually suggesting that community spaces shuttered as a result of his administration’s austerity drive be replaced by train carriages with toilets less modern than many at Glastonbury.

A government not so much tin-eared as deaf, blind and so out of touch with northern England that it tried to sell this insulting, laughable idea as something so thrilling that we would actually compete for rusty old trains long abandoned by Iran as too antiquated. Perhaps the civil servant who came up with it could totally see hipsters in Hackney turning them into bars serving cocktails out of old British Rail mugs with ironic names such as Pacer Colada or Screwdriver (Anyone? Train’s Broken Down). As Wigan MP Lisa Nandy put it: “If this is the ‘northern powerhouse’ they can keep it.”

As a very regular rail passenger in the north of England, I often have the extreme displeasure of travelling on Pacer trains. Famously cobbled together on the cheap, using the shell of a Leyland bus welded to a freight wagon frame, they went out of service in the south-east of England many years ago, but the government has allowed successive private rail companies to keep them rumbling on in the north. Never mind the fact that the doors jam, the roofs leak and the windows won’t close (you’ll have to keep your coat on and hood up in your new village hall).

I took one with my 10-year-old stepdaughter a few weeks ago. She lives in the Midlands, where Pacers went out of fashion before she was born, and wanted to know why the bench seats had no headrests and were all facing one direction like on a bus. Why are the brakes screeching like that? (“Flange squeal” on tight corners caused by the long wheelbase and lack of ride-smoothing bogies: themselves a modern luxury invented in 1874) If you flush the toilet does it really all end up on the track? (Yes) Why aren’t there any tables? (We northerners do not deserve such opulence) Can I plug in my iPod Touch? (dream on, honeybun).

Pacers were supposed to be phased out as part of the Northern rail franchise, which is so badly run that the mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool city region on Wednesday called for it to be taken under government control.

The National Railway Museum in York was hoping to put a Pacer on display in its history section this year but had to postpone the exhibition after Northern admitted it still needed them in service.

Jonathan Reynolds, MP for Stalybridge and Hyde in Greater Manchester, couldn’t see his constituents bidding for a Pacer cafe or playgroup. “I am not sure my constituents will agree that this is an ‘exciting opportunity’, unless one of them is turned into a museum dedicated to highlighting years of under-investment in northern transport,” he told the Manchester Evening News. “My personal suggestion would be to invite my fed up constituents to dismantle them piece by piece, a bit like when the Berlin Wall came down.”

There may come a time in the distant future – when a new high-speed rail line in the north from east to west has been built and it no longer takes almost three hours, one change and a fair wind to get from Liverpool to Hull – when we are ready to enjoy Pacers ironically. But not yet.

Helen Pidd is the Guardian’s north of England editor