a note about the trains

I have spent a considerable portion of this past year on trains. Actually, I have spent a considerable portion of my life on trains. I have had an obsession since childhood with these sorts of transitory spaces, where everyone is milling about, wasting money, waiting to get somewhere else. Thus I do no think it odd if I spend a few moments avoiding the paper I am supposed to be writing in order to pay homage to Britain’s horrid trains. Ok, they are not as bad as everyone in France (and probably elsewhere) thinks. It seems some networks are better than others. The last time I went to Scotland, the train was 3hours late returning, and I didn’t get home until 2 am or something like that. When I went to a conference in Nottingham, it took me several hours to get there and back. I was travelling from Cambridge and it apparently never dawned on the rail planners in this country to build normal tracks running cross-country, so I ended up on a two wagon contraption that stopped at everyplace between the two destinations. I would have been better off going back to London and heading north from there. But the commuter trains within the southern parts of England are not too awful. I have only been seriously delayed once this year, when someone decided to commit suicide on the tracks, an event for which the train company can hardly be held responsible.


If you travel in daytime, the trains are comfortable enough. In the morning they are hell: you have to pay double the price to travel before 9:30, and you never get a seat anyway, since there are so many commuters that if you get on at any station other than the first, you just have no hope of getting a space. So you have to sit on the floor with the masses. The first time I saw that, I was really shocked. In Russia, it would be unimaginable to see businessmen in expensive suits sitting on the floor of a train, dinking their coffee and reading their newspapers. But here it is an everyday occurrence; there is really no alternative if you don’t live exactly in the centre of London. There is a brief period in the early evening when it is equally as crowded, but not so badly and not for so long. It seems everyone in England goes to work at the same time, but they return at a wide variety of hours. The only train I really hate is the last one of the evening. It is horrid. They always use a really old and rotten train for this hour, which I guess based on the calculation that most of the passengers will be too drunk to notice the uncomfortable seats and peeling walls. The type of passengers depends on the day, but a high number are teenage and intoxicated. Sometimes there are no toilets, and even when there are, it is best to avoid them, as they resemble those in Moscow’s infamous Hungry Duck, circa 1997. Vomit on the floor, piss and shit all over the place…. you get the picture. So when I get stuck on that train, I just try to relax and listen to my music. The worst is that the last train of the night takes forever, since it stops at every little station along the way, not getting to my station until 2 am, which is not fun. If the weather in this country were better, I would never take that train; it would be more fun just to walk around until the morning ones started running at 4:30am. But as it has been cold and pissing rain for the past several months, sitting on a warm train with drunks with drunks in the middle of the night still seems preferable to wandering around on the streets for an extra 3 hours.
A final word: most of the train stations in England are lucky enough to have a Marks&Sparks inside them. This is a really major benefit. I finish work everyday at 3:30 and go running out of the building, across the street, to the station. I then have just less than 5 minutes to choose and pay for my dinner before boarding the 3:45 that takes me to my faculty. Most of the times, I choose something from M&S. I used to go for the baguette sandwiches at Upper Crust, but those get boring really quickly. At M&S they have a much wider variety of food- there are salads and pasta, all ready to go, which makes eating on the train almost bearable. So my daily commute would be a lot less pleasant without M&S.