Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

Yesterday, the UK Parliament began debating the construction of HS2, the proposed high-speed rail link which will initially connect London and Birmingham, and thence proceed to the north of England. Its progress through Westminster is set to be a convoluted journey – not unlike that of the trains themselves. So far, nobody has been able to come up with accurate costings for the project, and arguments about the route have raged since the proposals first saw the light of day. It's symptomatic of the way in which transport policy in this country has always been cobbled together. The line is currently set to slice through the Chiltern Hills, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to the north-west of London. Householders in the area (and some Tory MPs, with an eye to their majorities) have objected to this alternative, and would prefer to see it buried out of sight. It would add to the cost, of course, but an extra few hundred million pounds on a multi- billion pound construction schem...

It's that time of year again, when the claustrophobic nature of Aberdare and the closed-minded nature of many of its denizens really starts to grate on my nerves. It usually happens when the nice weather finally arrives, and my friends start embarking on day trips or short breaks to relieve the monotony of small town life. Yesterday, Rhian and I had a pint in the beer garden of Thereisnospoon, and talked about our various misadventures at the hands of Arriva Trains Wales over the years. It's a pity that I wasn't blogging back in the day, as I could have started a subsidiary blog charting the various events which prevented us from getting to work on time, or getting home at a reasonable hour. British Rail used to have an advertising slogan, Let the train take the strain . I told Rhian that my blog would have been called Let the Train Cause the Strain , and I've decided to adapt that title for this entry instead. I told her about a day trip to the north Devon resort of Ly...

The Wales Online website today has a feature called 7 Ways the Beeching Cuts stitched up the Welsh rail system . It highlights some of the absurd and time-consuming journeys faced by passengers travelling between our country's large towns, since the branch lines connecting them were torn up five decades ago (see Nice Work If You Can Get There .) One of the seven journeys they singled out was this: Unfortunately, as is the wont of local papers (and their websites), the gremlins got involved along the way. In true Private Eye tradition, the pictures have been transposed. The short journey, across the heads of the valleys via Merthyr and Aberdare, hasn't been possible in my lifetime. Instead, passengers have to travel via Newport, Cardiff, Bridgend and Neath in order to reach their destination. With this in mind, I've just sent the following email to the editor: I liked today's online feature about the way Dr Beeching ruined the railways in Wales. It was interesting to se...

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...