Flying by rail

As I'm now clearly old enough to be having a midlife crisis (my dream is to get a tattoo, a motorbike or even better a tattooed motorbike), I'm also old enough to grumble about the good old days. So I won't apologise for an aggrieved feeling that things (apart from the catering) really were better under British Rail. Sure the trains could break down or not show up, but actually that still happens. What we've lost is simplicity in the ticketing system (as I remember it, you had your ticket checked on the way in to a station and on the way out again - if your left at your destination there weren't any questions about how you got there), not to mention 3 months rather than one to use the return portion.

And what have we got in return? For some time now, it's been clear that privitisation has been about rising prices and profits for shareholders, rather than value for passengers. And the operating companies haven't been above introducing as much complexity as possible into the ticketing system to turn a profit. The only thing they haven't taken from the airline industry is the idea of getting from one place to another with the slimmest margins possible.

Surely the whole point of a public transport system is to provide an alternative to private transportation. When it takes half an hour of planning to work out the cheapest way to get from one place to another and when even the station staff have to look up routing information before they can let you through a ticket barrier, jumping in a car begins to look much more attractive.

And that's before we even get onto brining your bike with you.

Thankyou Mr Branson

Living without a car in the UK keeps you fit (or dead) and teaches the value of calmness in the face of adversity (the choice is this or death through sheer irritation).  It also gives you plenty of moments when you long for something as good as a third world transport system.

OK, I think you have the idea: I really object to madness of a rail privitisation designed on the back of a paper napkin and run on a market of lateness. There's a special circle of hell being built as I write, specially for those who think this is all a great idea, but it's probably being put together as a public/private partnership so it'll be centuries before the heating is running and the hideous torture machinery works. Assuming it doesn't all run over budget.

Last week was perhaps typical, in that I spent the better part of a day getting from Milton Keynes to Leominster (just bear with me). Some of it was my fault, leaving things behind and having to go back for them and it didn't help that I'd been up half the night before getting bits of work done.

The painful part was spending half an hour in a queue waiting to be told that there were no cycle reservations on any of the Virgin trains going North that afternoon. I wound up with two customer complaint forms, one for whatever they're calling the successor to Silverlink for the next 5 minutes, and one for Virgin.

Then some blessed angel on the platform let me on the train with my bike anyway. Of course there weren't any other bikes on it - it's a trick to discourage cyclists who don't get on and off fast enough.  Maybe not sticking the cycle carriage on the end of the train behind a locked door that only the guard or the platform staff can open would help?