There’s a big push at the moment to ditch air travel in favour of trains, and I’m all for it in theory. Flying is a miserable business. Airport terminals are wonderful if you’re the kind of person who feels the need to spend £4 on a bottle of water or to pick up a paperback written by the man responsible for The Diary of a CEO. For the sane and well though, the train ought to appeal more. No turning up three hours early, no molestation by security, no ears popping. But anyone who has ever endured the train between Glasgow and London will tell you: it’s not quite that simple.
Survivors know by rote the trials one endures. You sit yourself in the quiet carriage, surrounded by people talking incessantly. Several seats down-carriage, a child orates in pure stream of consciousness, pausing only to cough open-mouthed. You have not yet left.
10 minutes later the train pulls out of the station. Following a grating half-musical klaxon, a man screeches that you are indeed aboard the correct train, apologises for the delay, and reminds you that this service is strictly non-smoking, as has been every service for the better part of two decades. This includes the use of vapes and e-cigarettes. Those in the quiet carriage are reminded to keep noise to a minimum, but your railmates miss this because they are too engrossed in their conversations.
After just ten minutes you pull surreptitiously into a place called Motherwell. No announcement accompanies the arrival, and it’s not there in the Trainline app, but it happens anyway. No one gets on, no one gets off. There will be a sensible and proper reason for this, but it will elude you forever. In nights to come it will cross your mind and trouble you, though never seriously.
Bing bong! This is your catering manager speaking, who has a selection of sweet treats available. They are much more expensive than they would ordinarily be, but you reason that ordinarily a Twix would not travel at 150 miles per hour like the ones on this service do, so perhaps that’s worth the mark-up. Unfortunately due to something or other, hot drinks will not be available on today’s service. That’s another inconvenience that will have to be apologised for, which they do. Bing bong!
You’re just getting off to sleep now when a little motif, a synthy perfect fifth, plays three times. You assume that this means something. Again, you will never know what.
If you spot something that doesn’t look right, talk to one of the train staff and they’ll sort it. See it, say it, sorted. You consider raising the fact that you’ve been sitting idle in the middle of a field for 5 minutes when the klaxon heralds an imminent announcement from the man from before: they apologise for the inconvenience but we are having to wait here due to a late-running service in front of us, but we hope to be on the way soon. This late-running will ripple through the railway timetable, cascading backwards and delaying every subsequent service until the last syllable of recorded time.
By now you feel slightly sick, possibly a result of the awful heat and recycled air, possibly the sensory overload, possibly the three coffees you had in quick succession, possibly the late administration of today’s antidepressant. Who’s to say?
This is an announcement for passengers in carriage D – get out of carriage D as quickly as you can. The heating has jammed on and it’s now warm enough to cook a turkey. Furthermore, passengers in carriage F should note that the toilet is out of order, so please “go” elsewhere. I hear carriage D is pretty quiet this time of day.
You hurtle through places you only know from delayed transfers on previous return journeys, liminal towns like Preston and Crewe, places that seem to exist solely to be travelled through. The words “Upper Crust”, framed in garish yellow, flash by. You shudder.
You zoom through a rapid succession of red-brick post-industrial towns, rows of terraced houses from another time. Empty factories clog the horizon. The light falters as the day dies, the sky a roiling monochrome. You marvel at these places you will never visit full of people you will never meet, back gardens and kitchen windows framing a thousand faces with lives just as rich and complex as your own. To a man they are happier than you, because they are not on this train.
Any tickets there please? And can he see your railcard? Well there’s no use looking so chagrined sir, he’s only doing his job. And yes I suppose you could argue that he’s doing it in the most irritating way possible, and that he simply ought to take it on trust that your railcard is valid, but can you imagine the terrible manifold consequences of a world in which everyone paid just two thirds of the price of a full ticket? The worst excesses of the French Revolution etc.
Please mind the gap when alighting from this train. Please also mind, in no particular order:
- the uneven paving on the platform and in the station
- the champing throng of would-be passengers ready to sprint for a chance at an unclaimed seat in the carriage you’ve just left
- the vivid glow of an enormous screen advertising the new oat milk, Scandi holidays, and banks with interest rates that are either very good or very bad (you do not know which)
Euston, we have a problem!
Matthew Weldon's Dangerous Thoughts 