Is it me or does everyone have someone eating Macdonalds next to them when they board the train from London Paddington to Bristol temple Meads? Although I seem to spend my life on trains, there is something intriguing about train travel and the fact that it was invented such a long time ago and evolved into what it is today.One does wonder what train travel will be like in the future. Will we still be crammed into economy class, bumping knees with the people in front of us or playing elbow war with the person sat next to you? Will it get to a point when we like our personal space so much that trains are individual seats, or will the population get to a size where the seats have to be made bigger?
There is something exciting about going back in time, especially in the train stations that are typically Victorian with the grandeur of Paddington or St Pancras. However, we also seem to have built train stations similar to Bedford that doesn’t scream Victorian travel but more commuter station, a functional station with machines instead of the ticket person in Birmingham Moor Street, the most ornate station I know. Stepping onto a train is like stepping back in time.
The people that get trains are so diverse. You can categorise them as you would a school bus that has the trendy kids at the back, the geeks that are travel sick on the front seats in case they are the sick and the rest of us in the middle. I was always a middle person, wanting to be on the back seat but never achieving that rank in the social hierarchy. In hindsight, the back of the bus is much bouncier so what is so intriguing apart from it’s the furthest distance from the teachers?
In front of me now, I have an older gentleman who’s head is falling so much to one side that you know that head is going to roll over to the other side soon and annoy the person sat next to him…oh he has woken up and yep, exactly my prediction. To the side of me is the young woman that has scoffed a Macdonalds, ,filling the whole carriage with that distinctive waft that Ronald has visited but it’s ok, she has just asked ‘mummy’ to come and pick her up (must be in her 30)
To my right is the obviously married for 30 years couple who never actually talk to each other. I do fear that after so many years of marriage I won’t be the type couple that goes out for dinner and doesn’t actually speak to each other. I’m having a spate of this recently, and you know they are listening into your conversation just to keep themselves entertained. They are wearing ‘travelling clothes’, the light and airy clothes that mum used to make us wearr when we boarded planes. Any other day they would just be considered as clothes.
Quiet carriages are usually my favourite places, especially if a drunk person is fallen into the wrong carriage. I once sat next to a girl that asked me the same question over and over again “am I being too loud”. The fact that she kept asking me this question over and over again made the others stare at me as though she was my friend, and there was nothing I could do but do those facial expressions that I don’t know the person who is currently falling off the chair into the aisle. The best bit of the quiet carriage is when a mobile phone goes off, you get some people tutting louder than they ever would if they were face to face with the individual, then you have the confident ones who shout in the carriage ‘this is the quiet carriage’ that usually results in the mobile phone user not switching it off just out of annoyance, then you have the people that just sympathise with each other and do odd eyebrow lifts to each other saying ‘not another one’.
It’s time to sit back, relax and enjoy the journey, awaiting someone to sit next to me reading things of interest to me too so I can be nosy, or as I’m in the quiet carriage, I can’t wait to hear a phone go off.
