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?
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