A £26bn joke (& why chivalry is on life support)

Yep, I get it - the rail/travel rant is as old as time immemorial (to be accurate they are 300 seconds younger than rail travel itself). BUT they are still valid. Besides, I’ve already loaded both cartridges into the chamber. Pull!

I did a rare thing today - I retrieved a suit and cufflink dependent shirt from the wardrobe and then dusted and donned them. Today is an increasingly rare field day with meetings in London that need to be so, rather than via our two headed purple master (Teams).

A handsome bounty was paid (£66.39) for the pleasure - prior to driving to what I can only describe as the most calming station on earth (Kemble, Gloucestershire). Whilst sauntering (I am somewhat of a saunterer) to the platform I went to open Trainline to retrieve my tickets…

No matter, we move forward. The platform is packed and the gentile walled garden - eden like - abutting the platform is also packed - basked in premature March sunlight, children running around, seasoned Cotswold gents wryly smiling at the FT, laughter and yes, I kid you not, a juggler. It was so serene it could have been a french film set (I had visions of a Panzer crashing through the wall, flattening the gramophone squirting out overtures of Edith Piaf and upsetting the bistro tables and jugs of Chateau neuf de pape whilst a startled French waitress runs to the safety of a nearby stone loggia).

I digress.

The Panzer in my case was not of the tracked variety, it was in form of His Majesty’s Government - Department for Transport - the most feared weapon on the battlefield. On the very day they announce a rise of 4.6% we are greeted with a sardine can of a train - in fact we were told that two trains had indeed been shagged into just one train owing to a faulty door (Back in my day - late 00’s in fact, prior to the Hitachi sports trains, the doors were quite simple, rickety things, that you dourly accepted could be opened mid-transit at the drop of a bottle by a pisshead in-bound from Cardiff. The doors now are, I’m sure, a byproduct of SpaceX).

So, whilst the post-merge train was laying in bed with a cigarette, we were indeed cramming back inside of it - the great masses trying to get in and out of the sports train. And then the age old story begins to play - a packed carriage with helpless tourists (Who is on a fucking Cheltenham-London train MIDDAY on a Monday, I ask?). I shunt my way through a few inches of populous, coming to stand mere millimetres from the face of a fellow lady traveller (well Aged, I will add for the Blonde’s comfort). I explain I have a seat some way down the carriage and she instantly guffaws, saying I’ll probably have to evict a poor young yummy mummy from her seat with her homunculus still hanging off her. Too bloody right I would, how hard is it to reserve a bloody seat? Besides, I’m in a suit, I CLEARLY have work to do! (Some, but you’re also reading this - when do you think it was written?)

Well I was of course all talk and no trouser - my seat had indeed been occupied, it was indeed a yummy mummy, she indeed had not one but TWO homonculi (?) dangling from her - three if you count her husband. Strangely (she was of the American variety) a deal was soon reached and we performed the pasodoble that is a seat swap. So, chivalry is NOT dead - but it’s certainly in a care home.

So, freshly seated I begin to relax into some work. The gently frustrated tones of a GWR lacky interrupt our noisy peace and announce the issues with Train line and that as a result, no ticket checks would be taking place (Now i’m no thief, but does every rail journey end with you exclaiming that you just simply shouldn’t have bothered buying a ticket as nobody is going to check it?)

Groans can be heard throughout the sports train and I lock eyes with a chap opposite me - a gentle roll of the eyes, shake of the head and one of those weird half smiles/puff of air into the upper lip is executed - and we both return to our activities. This, I’m sure, is the ultimate display of what Bryson would see as Britishness.

In a final insult, and as to provide a cherry to the top of this cake, the train WiFi failed after an admirable 0.25 miles of travel from the station. Marvellous.

These aren’t just little niggly issues. Mundane, yes, but as much mundane as they are a national embarrassment. We are almost a year into Labour ownership as a country - a party most on the street would point to as safe custodians of the Railways (I happen to disagree - the party of the rail worker perhaps, but not of the rail commuter). More alarming is the fact that the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, must be experiencing exactly the same pain - She is the MP for Swindon South (I think that’s the nice bit) and as such should be sharing the woes of the South West Rail Commuter. Even with a whopping annual budget of £26.8bn a budget, Transport simply doesn’t work in this country.

A Reform voter would soon point out that the UK “Made the world great” and “built the railways” - We’re doing a bloody awful job at getting the basics right. Hilariously, as I finish writing this on the return journey from London, our train now has a door issue!

So - whether we pull the rail infrastructure, operators, ticketing, maintenance into one operator - UK Rail, BriTrain, UKTrain, His Majesty’s Rail & Locomotive Service - or sell it off in small Thatcharian chunks - we just need to get it right. Get it working, get it moving, get it cheaper.

Fin.