First-class passengers (single fare: £199.50) are given breakfast. Everyone else (£135.50) is allowed to visit The Shop. I went along and stared at the strange array of goods. They seemed to have been chosen almost wholly at random: five assorted paperbacks, some Ibuprofen, Hello magazine, the Daily Express, some nasty-looking drinks. I was reminded of the kiosks in Calcutta that sell whatever they can scrounge: months-old copies of the TV Times, a Latin textbook, used chewing gum, whatever.
The Shop was otherwise empty except for mine host, a young man with a vaguely estuarial accent called Umerji. I was just staring, appalled, at this pile of cack, dumped contemptuously on the public by a company past bothering. Suddenly he spoke.
‘Have a bacon roll, you cunt,’ he said suddenly.
At least I thought that’s what he said. There was a silence again. Nah, I must have been mistaken. Perhaps it was ‘Have a bacon roll or a Coke’. I carried on trying to find something that might make a tasty breakfast, and was beginning to wonder about the culinary possibilities of Ibuprofen . . .
‘. . . Or you’ll be here all fucking day,’ said Umerji. There was still no one else about. There was no venom in it: it was a sort of pleasantry. Perhaps this was now standard Virgin customer care and I’m out of touch. I asked him why he called me a cunt. He said he didn’t call me a cunt. But he didn’t say it indignantly: the denial was even, unblinking, as though this was an accusation that came up from daft passengers every day. That seemed like the final proof that I really hadn’t imagined this.
If I had wanted to complain, it was my word against his. Anyway, I didn’t want to complain: I thought it was hilarious really, and decided to celebrate, not with a bacon roll, but with a cinnamon and sultana Danish, which tasted like cardboard, and not even nice cardboard. But I thanked him profusely, nonetheless, and felt like warning him.
I mean, what if, one day, instead of a harmless bloke like me, he picked on someone who was writing a book about the railways, someone vindictive enough to stick this incident in his book, using his real name, to illustrate the sheer awfulness of Britain’s railways.
Seems like he had a narrow escape.
Paddington
On a cold and misty January evening in 2009, after a day of London meetings, I arrived at Paddington to catch the train home: First Great Western’s 1645 to Swansea. It was cancelled: mechanical failure. As an old hand with time to make plans before the next train, the 1715, I played guess-the-platform, got it right, boarded ahead of the crowds, and won a prize, precious enough under normal circumstances but doubly so when the previous service has been cancelled: a seat.
A troubled conscience impelled me to give it up at Didcot to a woman who thanked me so profusely I felt a complete swine, since I’d been ignoring her and all the other standers for the previous forty minutes while I read the papers. She was paying the full rush-hour fare for the 133 miles to Newport, which had gone up the previous week by 9%, from £155 to £169 second-class return.4 ‘Nightmare,’ said a man close by (seated).
Oh, come on, we ought to be giving these train companies some credit. The genuine nightmare of western governments that strange, cold and economically fearful January was of deflation – falling prices leading to out-and-out depression. No one was doing more to counteract that danger than Britain’s rail operators.
And this journey was not really the stuff of nightmares, not by British railway standards. By Swindon, an hour out, just about everyone had a seat. It might then have been at least theoretically possible to accept the regular invitations to visit the buffet, or to ask for a copy of the safety leaflet in Braille.
The train did seem more than normally sluggish as well as crowded, but it got to Newport only a couple of minutes behind schedule. Rats! I had been hoping I might be able to end this book by living up to the title and arriving eleven minutes late. Subsequent study of the timetable showed that this train, though normally off-limits to most passengers holding less expensive tickets, is about the slowest of the day. It takes ten minutes longer to Swansea than usual, or roughly half an hour longer than would have been possible thirty years ago.
At the very start of the first Reggie Perrin book, David Nobbs’ hero writes to the traffic manager of British Rail, Southern Region, to complain that his train always arrives eleven minutes late. ‘Why don’t you re-time your trains to arrive eleven minutes later? They would then be on time every morning.’ As fans of the series will know, Reggie was cracking up at the time. But, as we have seen, this has now become standard railway policy. Genius. Not for nothing did he go on to make a fortune from a company called Grot. Thus does life imitate art.
Reggie did something unusual and unBritish: he complained. The train companies regularly report that some overwhelming percentage of their passengers in surveys think the service is all right: only commuters whinge much. I am not that surprised. I myself have only ever written once to First Great Western, which was to say how magnificent the staff were when the system seized up due to the London bombs of 7 July 2005. I could have written hundreds of angry letters. But I didn’t – I’m British.
In 2008 the philosopher Julian Baggini produced a book called Complaint. He conducted a survey which showed that the British complained far more about corrupt politicians than the Americans did – although the corruption of British politicians is on a miniature scale compared to their US counterparts. But the Americans complained far more about public transport. And the weather.
This seems counter-intuitive, but maybe not. The British are used to grot when travelling. They expect it. They almost revel in it. I know: I’m one of them. The typical British railway experience is not being sworn at by the likes of Umerji (most buffet attendants are delightful if you can fight through the crowds to reach them); nor does it consist of marvelling at the mountains of Mallaig or sapphire-blue skies at Somerleyton. It is the high-price, low-grade hopelessness of journeys like this.
Among the stories that engrossed me while I was ignoring the standers was a report in that day’s Financial Times that there were further delays in the fraught process of finding a company to develop a new generation of high-speed diesels to operate on this route. One potential bidder, Alstom of France, had already pulled out, describing the specification set by the Department for Transport as ‘unworkable’.
The year 2030 will be the bicentenary of the Liverpool & Manchester. They should postpone any jollifications until 2031, the centenary of the Weir Report recommending total electrification of the system. The new trains, should they ever happen, would be able to transport revellers to the celebrations to mark the fact that the main line from London to the west – Brunel’s pride, God’s Wonderful Railway – would even then still be using an outmoded, uneconomic and unsustainable technology.
The previous day’s Guardian had reported that the new 220mph trains from Madrid to Barcelona had led to a huge rise in rail usage and a twenty per cent drop in domestic air travel. The Spanish government has major plans to expand its high-speed network. That’s backward old Spain, you know: mañana, Manuel, all of that. Britain that week was announcing a third runway at Heathrow instead. Yesterday’s solution to tomorrow’s transport problems. More noise, more filth, more pollution, more climate change, more hypocrisy, more pound-an-hour Stasi agents confiscating your toothpaste. There was talk that a major rail hub for Heathrow might be included as part of the plans. But the object of that was to placate the anti-runway protesters, not to build the rail hub. We know what will be chopped first as soon as the cost mounts.
A couple of weeks earlier, the editor of Rail magazine, Nigel Harris, had revealed that when he Googled the phrase ‘stupendously incompetent’, the first forty-one references that came up all concerned Britain’s Department for Transport. No. 42 referred to Inspector Clouseau. The words were a quote from a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee into a new departmental centre in Swansea that was supposed to save taxpayers £57 million but ended up costing them an extra £81 milli
on instead. Perhaps a few of the staff had put the train fares on their expenses.
A mysterious love of the railways remains a peculiar and often secretive British affliction – le vice anglais, the love that dare not speak its name. It is wholly unrequited. The people who run the trains do not love us.
Britain’s railways desperately need, as they have done since the First World War, a coherent and well-controlled programme of investment and development to enable the country to function in a very uncertain future. This is further away than ever because the irredeemable short-termism of British politics is now compounded by the fragmented nature of the railway system. None of the main actors – Network Rail, the train operators, the rail directorate of the Department for Stupendous Incompetence, the revolving-door secretaries of state, the prime ministers who would far rather be strutting the chandeliered chancelleries of the world – have any incentive to try to build a better system. ‘Rail is pricing itself out of the new transport market because improvements are so complicated and expensive,’ says Anthony Smith of Passenger Focus.
Yes, political life is full of complex choices. But nothing can excuse almost two centuries of ongoing fiasco detailed in this book. I have placed most of the blame on the generations of politicians who have taken the decisions. But it is not the politicians, in the final analysis, who are responsible for the mess. It’s us, because we let them do it.
AFTERWORD
The Mystery Train
It was Philip the garage owner who first spotted it. He gets a clear view of the railway from his forecourt and takes a keen interest in what goes by. In the early months of 2009, he began noting an unfamiliar train heading south through the Herefordshire countryside, just after nine every morning. It was a real train too, with a proper grown-up locomotive, something rarely seen in these parts. It even had a first-class compartment, long ago abolished on this line. He said there hardly ever seemed to be anyone on it.
Herefordshire is used to mystery trains. For a long while, the SAS retained a few carriages, shimmering like a mirage on some rails in a field, presumably so they could be stormed from time to time. I fondly imagined that there were passengers on them, sitting there patiently through the years while recorded messages periodically apologized for the continuing delay to their journey.
But this was very different: a train that raced through the entire county of Herefordshire without stopping. No passenger train in memory has been scheduled to run straight through Hereford station and it could come as a shock: one woman arrived to meet her husband and saw him wave as he was carted off to Shrewsbury, fifty miles away. The southbound actually does ninety-five miles non-stop, between Shrewsbury and Newport. This is totally against the trend of the British railway system; increasingly expresses double up as local stoppers.
This is not the only unusual feature of this train, as I discovered when I finally found somewhere it did stop. It has an official name – Gerald of Wales. At least, that’s what the indicator board at Newport said, though Gerald, a great traveller in his day (c.1146 ad – c.1223), was never mentioned again. Named trains are out of style now. Then again, style is also out of style. Since the first edition of Eleven Minutes Late went to press at the start of 2009, dining cars have almost wholly disappeared from Britain’s railways. As predicted (see Prologue), First Great Western kept its wonderful breakfasts secret enough to make abolition – in May 2009 – inevitable. A company good for almost nothing got rid of the one small thing in which it aspired to excellence. Elsewhere, even the service notionally known as the Flying Scotsman no longer has a restaurant, thanks to the short-lived disastrous reign of National Express over the East Coast Main Line.
Gerald, in comparison, was like a cruise liner. The Queen herself might say she is not used to being this pampered. First-class passengers are automatically entitled to dinner on the way north and breakfast heading south. My eog mwg gydag afocado (smoked salmon and avocado) and stec porc gyda saws afalau a seidr (pork steak with apple and cider sauce) were pretty good, and next morning’s breakfast was excellent: very fine selsigen, cig moch cfen a wy (sausage, bacon and egg). And ‘standard’ passengers did not miss out: the carriages were old Inter-City stock, configured in a way which recognizes that even second-class people have torsos and legs, not all of them standard size.
Most extraordinary of all, the train is operated by Arriva Trains Wales, a company which otherwise only runs trains that are cramped, nasty and squalid. I am especially fond of the announcements warning passengers to keep their personal belongings with them at all times – which is generally impossible unless you can stick them on a seat, since the luggage racks cannot hold even an overnight bag and there is no space between the seats.
The first-class compartment on Gerald was reasonably full of diners including a group of three Welsh-speakers sitting just across from me, engaged in earnest conversation. I love listening to Welsh: it’s the combination of the lovely sentence rhythm (so exotic, so melodious) mixed with the sudden reversions to English. The man was in full flow to his lady companions: ‘Diddle-dee, diddle-dum, diddle-dah, diddle-dum. Galloping hypocrite!’
As the journey progressed, I began to understand the purpose of the mystery train. Gerald leaves Holyhead at 0532 in the morning. This is the promised souped-up version of the Limping Welshman (see Chapter Ten), shaving at least twenty minutes off the normal journey time to Cardiff. And it is now possible to arrive in Cardiff before ten, do about five and three-quarter hours’ work (provided the work is next to the station) and be back in Holyhead by ten at night without having to endure Arriva’s regular services. No need for an overnight bag.
This service is entirely funded by the Welsh Assembly and fathered by Ieuan (pronounced, as all rugby-followers know, Yye-an) Wyn Jones, Leader of the Plaid Cymru group in the Assembly, Deputy First Minister of Wales, Minister of Transport and Member for Anglesey. It is known colloquially as Von Ieuan’s Express. There is now also an air service from Anglesey to Cardiff, of which Jones is said to be not merely the chief funder but the most frequent flyer. This is known as Ieuan-air.
Now I have nothing but praise for Von Ieuan’s Express. One of the fundamental theses of this book is that, if railways are to thrive in the twenty-first century, they have to exploit their advantage as a comfortable, enjoyable, civilized means of travel. But what’s going on here? Arriva Trains Wales habitually does damn-all for its passengers’ comfort. The company indulges this service, not just because it’s paid-for, but because the Welsh Assembly will have a statutory role in deciding whether or not the franchise gets renewed, and has to be kept sweet.
And who benefits from the first class, occasional eccentrics aside? Well, who in Wales – in these recessionary times, when bean-counters stalk the corridors of even the richest corporations and indulgence is out of fashion – can get their first-class fares paid without question? Guess. The three Welsh-speakers, I was assured, were on Welsh Assembly business. The two blokes next to me on the way back definitely were. Piecing together various bits of evidence about some of the others, those on government exes were almost certainly in the majority.
Gladstone instituted the ‘parliamentary train’ in 1844 to ensure that the working-classes could get the benefit of the new means of transport at an affordable fare. Now we have a new kind of parliamentary train: for the benefit of parliamentarians themselves. It needs a catchier name. Forget Gerald of Wales. The Limping Welshman isn’t right. I know: how about the Galloping Hypocrite?
Not everyone on board was a professional politician. On the long final non-stop dash, as we hurtled heedlessly through the Marches like Lenin’s sealed train, I got talking to a bloke who turned out to be a senior Arriva manager, and took the opportunity to blather on, making what must have seemed like familiar observations on the railways.
‘There’s a book just out about this stuff,’ he said. ‘Quite interesting. It’s called Eleven Minutes Late.’
Perhaps my face flickered.
‘
You didn’t write it, did you?’
The God Adonis
For the average British railway traveller – more concerned about a seat than smoked salmon – little changed in 2009. The trains muddled through much as ever.
Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the operating companies had raised every single price that was not nailed to the floor by the government whenever and however they could. It was the classic response of quasi-monopolists to booming demand at a time when the economy was flourishing.
In 2009, with the economy in trouble, demand began to falter. So the operating companies started to raise their prices again to try to protect their revenue from the falling number of passengers. Heads we win; tails you lose. In September 2008, after years of pressure, the operators had announced a universal, simplified pricing structure. It took less than a year for First Great Western to renege on the deal by using various legal loopholes to raise their prices opaquely. A company spokesman with a first-class degree in chutzpah said that ‘fares simplification was not always good for passengers because, taken to extremes, it would just result in one very expensive fare’. Even the wimps at Passenger Focus said their policy amounted to ‘legalized mugging’. Other companies were expected to use similar tricks for their January 2010 price revision.
A couple of months earlier, National Express – having plastered the East Coast Main Line with its tacky little stickers and generally trashed the line’s reputation for quality – found itself obliged to signal its withdrawal from the franchise, its powers of foresight having failed to match its avarice.
If usage was falling, the trains certainly did not feel more spacious. Travelling on the Brighton line, I remembered Sir Laurence Olivier’s campaign to prevent the abolition of kippers on the Brighton Belle. That was 1972. Gone now: Larry, Belle and all. These days they pack the passengers like kippers instead.
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