Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

Yesterday I finished reading Matthew Engel's book Eleven Minutes Late , (Pan Macmillan, 2009) which I can heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in the rail industry, social history, or travelling in the UK. Mr Engel's book cleverly weaves these three strands together, following his journeys along the main lines and branch lines of this small island. He meets a host people who work or travel on the trains, and chronicles the random development of the railway network over two centuries. The book ends with him back on his home turf, travelling to his local station at Newport (Gwent), as the rail companies call it these days. I thought I'd share some of his observations with you. He started his journey at Holyhead – almost – as this extract explains: [T]he 1635 back to Cardiff, now operated by Arriva Trains Wales, did its best to go nowhere near Holyhead either, starting out 300 yards away from the buffers and the ticket halls, as though holding its nose. Holyhead is al...

My brother used to work as a cartographic draughtsman for a number of public bodies. In fact, we used to joke that if anyone was ever digging up the ground anywhere in Wales (and a fair chunk of Western England), there was a good chance that he'd drawn up the plans beforehand. One useful piece of jargon I picked up from his career was 'desire line.' You've probably all come across desire lines, but I expect very few of you ever realised that they had a name. According to Wikipedia (because I'm at home, and I haven't got access to any textbooks on Town and Country Planning): desire path (also known as a desire line , social trail , goat track or bootleg trail ) can be a path created as a consequence of foot or bicycle traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width of the path and its erosion are indicators of the amount of use the path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where...

Since leaving politics, the former Conservative MP Michael Portillo has carved out a new career as a broadcaster. His Radio 4 series The Things We Forgot to Remember looks at major historical events from angles which don't normally get covered in books. However, in my opinion, his real triumph started from a brilliantly simple idea: to use a Victorian guide to the British railways as a basis for exploring the history and culture of these islands. Great British Railway Journeys does exactly what it says on the tin. Mr Portillo criss-crosses a section of the country by train, visiting places which were mentioned in George Bradshaw's guides from the 1860s. At each stop he meets a local guide and gets a potted history of some of the events which shaped this country's development in Victorian times. I watched three of these programmes back-to-back last night, and only stopped because my medication had kicked in. To be perfectly honest, I could have watched them all night witho...

I've never been a 'city' person as such, in spite of living, studying and/or working within fairly easy reach of Cardiff and London during my life. When I was growing up, getting to Cardiff was a long and very complicated expedition by bus (there were no trains from Aberdare until 1988.) Mother always hated the drive into the city centre, so we used to visit Swansea out of preference. That was where we did our Xmas shopping every year. Cardiff was an occasional necessary evil, best avoided if we had the choice. Now, in 2013, the train to Cardiff takes about an hour. On the other hand, you can get to Swansea from Aberdare, but it takes ages, involves two different companies and at least one change of buses. There's no possibility of getting there by public transport if you're working normal office hours, and you can forget any idea of getting home after the shops close. (See A Letter to the Editor 6 .) So it goes… Even when I was at university only an hour away from...

'Autumn woes' was the headline on BBC Wales' summary table of the home nation's dismal performance in the Autumn Rugby Tests since 2009 (eleven defeats and a draw.) 'Autumn woes' could also sum up the experience of passengers on the South Wales Valleys Lines over the past couple of weeks. As I told you in Wet Wednesday , Martin H. and I were fortunate enough to catch a delayed train home from Abercynon last week. Had it actually been on time , we'd certainly have missed it. On 5 November, my friend Alexis reported that the train from Cardiff to Aberdare was running approximately twenty minutes late. Arriva Trains Wales had come up with arguably the best excuse to date – the delay had been caused (this time) by a fireworks display. Back in the days of British Rail, the late running and cancellation of trains was a standing joke, and a great source of comic material. Reginald Perrin used to arrive at Sunshine Desserts eleven minutes late every morning. Driven ...

I'm in Cardiff at the moment, using a remarkably slow wifi, even by Wetherspoon standards. I needed to get online as I had an email from Andy Tillison via Facebook yesterday (see Our Friends in the North .) By way of thanks for my support from (almost) the beginning of Gold, Frankincense and Disk Drive's career, he'd sent me the entire CD of Where Do We Draw The Line? and the accompanying booklet as a zip file. I didn't fancy using up all my bandwidth trying to download it using Myfi, so I decided to wait until I got to the pub instead. Shanara the Dippy Bint phoned me yesterday, to see what time I anticipated being in town. We must have some sort of weird psychic link, as we always seem to know when one of us is thinking about the other. We're going to have coffee in the restaurant of House of Fraser (which was formerly Howell's, and also played the part of Henrik's Department Store in a few episodes of Doctor Who ), as we can take the baby in there. After...