Trains – Going Downhill

I used to like traveling by train. When I was little a train ride was a special treat, enjoyed only rarely when my mum took us to see some relatives far away. Those days trains were big, dirty, and terribly noisy monsters that you could hear and see miles away. Just the sort of things that kids like.

Even in my teens when I was ready to denounce most things (regardless of whether I understood them or not) I still liked trains. Not in that geeky way, though. I never owned a miniature railway or bed sheets with pictures of trains on them - I had brown bunnies on my sheets, thank you very much. But I liked to travel by train. I am a veteran of two InterRail trips around Europe, and I enjoyed every minute of them. There’s nothing quite like getting out of the train at six in the morning in Bucharest with a killer hangover. You just know that those days will be interesting. And so was the drunken conversation with a couple Romanian guys I met in the train the night before. We had no common language so we just drank their home made booze, named footballers and gave them thumbs up or down. More elaborate signs were needed when we tried to agree that certain English midfielder was indeed greatly overrated, although he did have a decent right foot and a pretty face.

These days, however, I find myself enjoying travel by train less and less. And it’s not just because they are always late. In fact, that hardly bothers me at all. I certainly don’t care about a few minutes here and there. The people that have nothing else to talk about than trains being late, they bother me. Give me a couple of drunken Romanians and a football magazine, and I will have much better time. Ok, I might need the booze as well.

What bothers me is that trains are becoming more and more boring all the time. It used to be great to go to the restaurant car and have a drink and a chat with a complete stranger. You could find yourself in the most bizarre conversations – and company. Restaurant cars used to be naturally sociable places, where you could escape the smelly man in the seat next to yours.

But that’s history now. In some trains they don’t have restaurant cars at all, only those little trolleys that are always squeaking next to you if you try to sleep but are never there when you want a drink. Where they still have restaurant cars they have made sure that the visitors want to leave as soon as they have scoffed their over-priced sandwiches: the seats make stone slabs feel soft and comfortable, everything costs more than it does in the trolley, and the queues are ridiculously long.

Taking a train these days is like flying (another form of transport I’m not so keen on). You sit in your seat throughout the trip, you don’t talk to anyone, and you sure as hell don’t feel like this is a place where you are expected to enjoy yourself. I realize that this is the way that most things work these days: restaurant cars are more expensive to build and maintain than the bloody trolleys, hard seats last longer than the nice old soft ones, and as always, profits are determining what we get for our money.

But after all the rationalisation, cost effectiveness, and service improvements, what do we really get – dull train rides, that’s what!