Trains

Friday

Rob Crossan

Britain’s lack of trains on Boxing Day is shameful

Among all the perfidies of public transport in Britain (a nation that can build a £40 billion railway based on the premise that the outskirts of Acton counts as a ‘central London’ terminus), perhaps the most ludicrous of all is this. On 26 December, a day when millions of us need to move about, no trains run. HS2 makes me angry. But I’ve spent every festive period of my adult life feeling positively dyspeptic about the meek acceptance with which we tolerate the almost complete lack of trains departing or arriving at any UK railway stations on Boxing Day. We are an absolute, solitary outlier in this regard. Even in

Thursday

Richard Bratby

This museum is a lesson for all curators

The National Railway Museum is 50 years old, and it’s come over all literary. A quote from Howards End stands at the entrance to the newly refurbished Station Hall: railway termini, proclaims Forster, ‘are our gates to the glorious and the unknown’. T.S. Eliot salutes you on the way out: ‘You are not the same people who left that station.’ Big claims, but as it turns out, largely to the point. The changes to the Station Hall are subtle but numerous, making the argument that as well as being the foundational technology of modern civilisation, railways are a culture in their own right. The aim, say the curators, is to

Monday

Alec Marsh

Happy 200th birthday to our railway

You might have missed this because it hasn’t exactly been saturated with media coverage, but this week is the 200th birthday of Britain’s railway. In fact, it’s the 200th birthday of all railways, since we invented them. It was on 27 September 1825 that service began on the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Travelling a distance of just eight-and-a-half miles at about 15mph, the world’s first public commercial rail service arrived to a crowd of 10,000 and – as would become a characteristic feature of future British rail travel – was delayed by half an hour due to engineering problems. Yes, the worldwide rail revolution began in the north-east of England

Thursday

Richard Bratby

How the railways shaped modern culture

Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It’s not that he’s a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it’s written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s song ‘Blues in the Night’: ‘Now the rain’s a-fallin’, hear the train a-callin’ “whoo-ee”.’ And so Sinatra sings it, just as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sang it. It’s an American classic, defined by the sounds that permeate the soul of American popular music: the sounds of the railway. Two hundred years

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

With glee to the silvery sea

Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great North of Scotland Railway described the Moray Firth as ‘the Scottish Riviera’. The Furness Railway named Grange-over-Sands ‘the Naples of the North!’ (The exclamation mark injected a smidgeon of doubt, Martin feels). More realistic companies toned down their boasts. The LNER decided it should go no further than claim it took passengers to ‘The Drier

Monday

Rob Crossan

The worst culprits for noise pollution on trains? The staff

Modern irritations seem to come in threes. No sooner do you trip over a Lime bike ‘parked’ on its side in the middle of the pavement than you discover that the self-checkout in the Co-op has a handwritten note stating ‘out of order’ taped to it and the man in front of you in the queue for the sole remaining human-staffed counter is attempting to buy (and scratch) 14 lottery tickets.  That’s what happened on my venture out of the house this morning, anyway. The experience sent me scurrying home again to muse on whether I have had a more dispiriting, in the picayune sense, start to any morning this

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Will Labour’s rail replacement service leave travellers stranded?

By spooky coincidence, on Saturday night I watched an old episode of Slow Horses in which a passenger died mysteriously on a replacement bus between High Wycombe and Oxford Parkway – and on Sunday I woke to reports that the first service of the new era of rail renationalisation, the 5.36 from Woking to Waterloo, had also featured a replacement bus. Nobody died, but it wasn’t a good omen. Nor was it quite the ‘turning point for the future of our railways’ that Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander declared. South Western Railway’s return to state hands this week was in fact the fifth major passenger franchise to go that way –

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

How Berlin nearly broke Bowie

This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978. It was a fraught, make-or-break time. Out of pocket, addicted and depressed, Bowie had grown ‘very, very worried’ for his life. It isn’t entirely clear why he chose Berlin as a place for recovery, other than that it was unstarry, cheap and a good distance from LA, where his troubles had spiralled. Unfortunately, it was also ‘the smack

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Save our steam engines!

Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not in celebration, but in mourning. It was a tiny mechanical wake for Mamod, the Birmingham firm which has made model steam engines since 1936, and which has announced that it is ceasing production. It’s estimated that more than 2.5 million engines have been sold by the company over the years. As commerce and government push

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

A gripping podcast about America's obsession with guns

The love affair between so many Americans and their guns – long a source of international fascination – appears to be getting more painfully intense. The greater the publicity over gun crime, the more Americans think they’d better acquire a firearm to keep themselves safe. There are now roughly 400 million guns in the US – but most citizens feel more unsafe than ever, and with some justification. Last year featured both the highest level of gun ownership in US history and the highest recorded number of mass shootings. This really is one to listen to in bed, in the pitch dark – even better, pretend you’re in a couchette

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘The potential for jeopardy’: Pullman Dining on the Great Western Railway, reviewed

I am lazy and nosy, and so I spend a lot of time on the GWR service from Penzance to London Paddington. Each journey is a play with a unique atmosphere. Some are seething, particularly in summer when an eight-carriage train cannot fit everyone who wants to swim in the ocean but dine in west London that same night. Some are non-committal; some restful. I rage at usual things: luggage in the disabled space, which is almost always occupied by the non-disabled, though they may be fat; videos played without headphones; young people swearing at older people because they grapple with a rage they cannot understand. You can measure the

Wednesday

Rory Sutherland

Are we asking the wrong questions about HS2?

I am not sure there was much else Rishi could have done to salvage HS2. But I come bearing good news. There is no reason why HS2 cannot still be a great railway, even if it travels along the wrong route at the wrong speed and was constructed in the wrong direction to solve a problem which no longer exists. All you need to do is redefine what the railway is for. Perhaps it can be the right answer to a different question. A useful precedent for reinvention here might be what was originally called the Millennium Dome. Though hopeless at fulfilling its original purpose, once reinvented as the O2

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Bernard Looney shows why every board should be braced for scandal

Bernard Looney, the fallen BP chief, always had a certain swagger about him. I’ve no idea whether he was unsafe in taxis, but he was certainly prone to unguarded remarks. ‘Not every barrel of oil in the world will get produced’ was a bold way, back in 2018, to introduce BP shareholders to the idea that the world’s energy giants will one day have to strand remaining carbon assets if they really intend to achieve net-zero targets. ‘This is literally a cash machine’ was not the best way to describe BP’s profit performance in November 2021, when British households were beginning to feel the pain of soaring energy bills. And

Wednesday

Rory Sutherland

Just stop HS2!

I have two suggestions for HS2. Either stop it or make it stop. The spiralling cost and delays are reason enough to rethink the project, never mind the changes to patterns of rail use since 2021. Any economic case based on pre–pandemic projections needs to be revisited. So one option would be to stop the project completely. But what if the project goes ahead in a reduced form to save face? Well, in this case, the need for speed is questionable. The value of speed to passengers is far from linear. For instance, cutting a journey time from four hours to two, as the TGV did between Paris and Lyon, is

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

You think British trains are bad? Try German ones

I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered, unseeing, through an expectoration of towns: Zutphen, Eefde, Gorssell. He was 79 years old, he told me, and returning to Berlin for the first time in 61 years for a meeting with an old friend. Our steward made it absolutely clear he couldn’t give a stuff that there was no buffet car Back in 1962, Jean-Pierre had been a very young Belgian Jesuit employed in smuggling hard currency from West to East Berlin, which he did by stuffing the notes inside a plaster cast which covered his right leg. There

Mark Mason

Gloves, tea strainers and a game of Monopoly... how the Great Train Robbery unfolded

We don’t know if the two teenagers who attempted a train robbery in Scotland this week knew that it was the 60th anniversary of the most famous one in British history. Given their failure – nothing was stolen and the charges include ‘malicious mischief’ – it seems unlikely. Either way, the train robbery of August 1963 remains secure in its title of ‘Great’. Why did it fascinate us so much in the first place? Partly it was the zeitgeist timing (that year also saw Profumo, Beatlemania and JFK’s assassination); partly the amount stolen (£2.5 million, worth more than £40 million today); and partly the narrative of ‘plucky underdogs vs the

Wednesday

Peter Jones

Why Putin should watch his back

How secure is Vladimir Putin? His Presidential Security Service consists of 2,500 personnel, his Federal Protective Service of 50,000 troops and the National Guard, essentially his personal army, of 350,000. What could possibly go wrong? Roman emperors might have had a view. It was Augustus who invented the Praetorian Guard (27 bc), a personal, prestigious protection force of 9,000 men, based in Rome and accompanying him abroad. It did not start well. The second emperor Tiberius came within an ace of being displaced by his captain of the Guard Sejanus. The next (insane) emperor Caligula was murdered by conspirators, including a Praetorian, and the Guard hauled out a terrified Claudius

Friday

Alec Marsh

Bring back the railway restaurant car

It’s six o’clock and you’ve fought your way on to a train at a major London terminus. The carriage is rammed – heavily pregnant women, the stricken and the young stand in the corridors like it’s A&E – and everywhere people are diving into takeaways. The pungent egg and cress sandwich from Pret is bursting at the seams next to you; on the other side of the table there’s a lout blasting music from his phone speaker and eating the smelliest katsu curry money can buy. A pasty is crumbling down the front of a businessman going to fat on the far side of the aisle; another tubby businessman belches

Tuesday

Hannah Langford

Trains, planes and wheelchairs: why is this still a route to disaster?

Whenever I take a train journey, I am filled with dread. Despite always booking assistance, I am terrified there won’t be someone at my destination with a ramp to help me and my powered wheelchair on to the platform. Many a time has my travel companion – or a complete stranger – had to straddle the train and the platform to stop the train doors closing with me stuck inside. I have frequently arrived at my destination late and stressed, left with the impression that my time doesn’t matter. What on earth could I be late for – surely nothing important? So I have read with horror, but not surprise,

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

It’s time to clear out the Bank of England’s board

Liz Truss says she intends to review the Bank of England’s mandate, which has been fixed as a 2 per cent inflation target since Gordon Brown gave the Bank its independence in 1997. We’re told Governor Andrew Bailey, keen to keep his job, thinks a review is ‘probably the right thing’. But is it? A return to the long-term inflationary average of 2 per cent is highly desirable as soon as global price spikes subside – but if the odds-on next PM thinks the Bank incapable of achieving it, setting more dynamic inflation-and-growth objectives would surely be an overreach. Instead, maybe she should take her axe to the organisation, starting