Bring back the railway restaurant car

It’s six o’clock and you’ve fought your way on to a train at a major London terminus. The carriage is rammed – heavily pregnant women, the stricken and the young stand in the corridors like it’s A&E – and everywhere people are diving into takeaways. The pungent egg and cress sandwich from Pret is bursting at the seams next to you; on the other side of the table there’s a lout blasting music from his phone speaker and eating the smelliest katsu curry money can buy. A pasty is crumbling down the front of a businessman going to fat on the far side of the aisle; another tubby businessman belches peanuts and is moving on to his third gin and slimline tonic; and a Big Mac and fries is disappearing into the space between a pair of headphones opposite and will repeat all the way to Chester.

Amid the coughing, the incessant phone-ringing and the bovine moaning of the standing you realise that were Dante alive today he would add another concentric circle of hell labelled ‘West Coast Main Line’.