 |
| The end of the line? After decades of neglect and funding cuts, by the late eighties much of Britain's once great national railway network was starting to look like this. Even worse, a large proportion of route mileage was already gone thanks to the infamous Beeching Cuts of the sixties, most of which were executed by a Labour government. |
In a regular series of posts ANDY
They say that travel broadens the
mind, and foreign travel especially. I was a late starter in getting “the bug”
for it. In fact it was on our honeymoon in August 1989 in Paris that I first
set foot on foreign soil. And as a graduate student of sociology with modules
in transport and planning what a shock it was.
We arrived in Paris via train, to
me the most civilised form of mass transport, at Gare du Nord. The journey had
been a real eye opener. We had travelled all of the way by train from
Darlington, enjoying an overnight stay in central London and then using the
ferry for the short crossing to Boulogne (this was before the Channel Tunnel of
course).
Nothing remarkable in this, but on
a personal level, visiting France for the first time was a big event in my
life. At the age of twenty nine I had previously developed the view that
everything about our country was best. Its education, health care, welfare, and
other state systems and infrastructure were at the apex of civilisation.
My first footsteps on to the
Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF) express train shattered
this UK-centric worldview. Clearly, before I had even tested a word of my
pigeon French out on an unsuspecting local person, this wasn’t just a journey
of discovery in terms of culture, society and country; it was a tale of two
completely different national railway systems, and it would be a comparison in
which Britain would inevitably come out a very poor loser. Bear in mind too our
journey was at the time TransManche Link (TML) were still excavating the
Channel Tunnel, Eurostar trains were still a couple of years in the future.
On time we left Boulogne and
travelled through the beautiful countryside of northern France at high speed on
our way to the nation’s capital. We were seated inside a second class
compartment, but it appeared to both my wife Gill and myself to be perfect
luxury. In fact, we had initially inadvertently mistaken our coach as being
first class and we might be reprimanded for sitting there. Our worries soon
abated on a walk down the train to enjoy the delights and service of a fully
stocked restaurant and buffet car. That’s because first class was even more
luxurious. This was first class travel with a second class ticket. Through
Amiens and on to Paris we were whisked to pull into Gare du Nord on time to the
second. This was how rail travel should be, I thought.
