Trains

Misplaced Trust Sir: Charles Moore is as ever bang on target (The Spectator’s Notes, 26 September). National Trust members have had a raw deal this year, but so have many loyal staff and volunteers. It should not surprise any visitor to a National Trust property that a very rich person built it and lived there. No doubt they achieved great financial wealth by being quick-witted, entrepreneurial and above all ruthless in their dealing. They likely exploited everyone irrespective of race or creed. How many mill owners sent ‘boys’ up chimneys, down mines and into the machinery to clear blockages? The National Trust is a curator of buildings, artefacts and estates.

I was on a train from Sussex to London, my first since lockdown, when I realised I like my commute. The thought worried me a little. What kind of weirdo have I become? A commute is a psychological hurdle, something to be endured, not enjoyed. What’s next? The giddy thrill of waiting in a queue? A root-canal fan club? There are some aspects to commuting I don’t enjoy — the expense of a season ticket, of course, and frustrating delays — but overall, yes, I do like it. And during lockdown I actually missed it. What makes my enjoyment even weirder is that I have no interest in trains. There

Not an island Sir: I and those with whom I live and work are all within coughing distance of Sam Leith’s ‘threshold of death’ and we need no reminders that your body is your own, because we wish to God it wasn’t (‘Last rights’, 20 April). But as it is, we owe it to that body to see the process through. My ‘going hence’ is not a private matter. I am not an island but a piece of the continent and that connection is the key to the human genius of social literacy. We demented dodderers are an eighth age, a new demographic, practically a new species, and we bring with

‘Virgin trains could be gone from the UK in November,’ blogged Sir Richard Branson from his billionaire hideaway after the Department for Transport barred Stagecoach, Virgin’s 49 per cent joint-venture partner, from bidding for new passenger rail franchises. This followed a row over Stagecoach’s reluctance to help fill a £6 billion black hole in the Railways Pension Scheme – and affects Stagecoach’s bids for the East Midlands and South Eastern franchises as well as the renewal of Virgin’s West Coast Main Line service. Branson is always a sore loser on the rare occasions the dice don’t roll his way, but I doubt many travellers will mourn the passing of his

A month ago I wanted to travel to Bath for a 60th birthday party. From Kent, this either involves a Tube journey to Paddington or traversing the south-western stretch of the M25, where — in the rare moments you are not in stationary traffic — you have the even worse experience of driving over 10,000 misaligned slabs of ribbed concrete. But deep in my hippocampus, I remembered seeing a train to Bath on the departures board at Waterloo. This would let me travel from Seven-oaks to Waterloo East, avoiding the Tube. I looked online, but the website denied all knowledge of such trains. It told me to take the Underground

‘How could you forget to get on the train?’ asked the keeper. ‘I can understand how you forgot to get off the train, but how were you standing on the platform waiting for another train to go back the other way, and the train came but you forgot to get on it?’ I had been on my way from Victoria to Clapham Junction. The keeper had rung to say he was popping in to let the dogs out and did I want them fed? I was telling him no thanks, as I would be on the train to Guildford in a few minutes. But as I was sitting in my

Every now and then I try to invent a new scientific unit. I’ll never come up with anything as good as the millihelen — a unit of beauty sufficient to launch one ship — or the Sheppey, which is a distance of approximately seven-eighths of a mile defined as ‘the minimum distance at which sheep remain picturesque’. But I do have hopes for the tedion, which measures the half-life of boredom: it denotes the time you must spend in a location to enjoy a 50 per cent chance of overhearing someone say something interesting or funny. On a train to Cardiff or Manchester, a tedion is probably around five to

Virgin East Coast, reneging on its franchise, is not in anyone’s good books at the moment, but since it is the only direct service available from Newcastle upon Tyne to London, many in the north-east have no option but to use it. The service in my experience is pretty good, and even better when it is possible to book well ahead and thereby, with use of the Old Gits’ railcard, treat oneself to a seriously cheap first-class advanced ticket. This offers excellent value for money, the food and drink far better than that on the West Coast equivalent. But the icing on the cherry is the quiet coach. Occasionally top

Poor Gordon Brown. He embodies the problem traditionally associated with being male, which is that our sex finds it difficult to understand human feelings. Mr Brown recognises, he says in his forthcoming autobiography, that he was not suited to a touchy-feely age. Perhaps it was just as well, because once men, particularly Members of Parliament, start touching and feeling they get into even more trouble, and discover — often too late — that not everyone they touch and feel welcomes it. They are, you might say, groping in the dark. Once upon a time, a high percentage of women understood this defect and usually forgave the opposite sex. But now