Great rail journeys

An epic train trip up to Runcorn. What is the attraction of Runcorn exactly. Well, it has the last unmodernised shopping centre in the world, complete with a Wimpy where you get china, cutlery and waitress service. It has locals who talk funny but are quite lovely. Most of all it has the treatment centre where I get my various pox treated with discretion assured.



When you travel, you enter a bubble. This means you can cast off the normal constraints of time and social interaction. If you want to sit in a seat and listen to your iPod and read your book or, my favourite, hold your paper around you like raising shields on the Enterprise, nobody is going to care. What always astonishes me is how many people are travelling all the time. I always think that every journey I take is special (and considering how lazy I am, it is) so does that mean everyone else is having a special journey too? Good rule of thumb - camera means journey is exciting to person, briefcase means they would rather be golfing or tied up in a dungeon being whipped.

Euston station at nine in the morning and the locals appear to be under the misapprehension that they are in a foreign city. This effect is only slightly spoiled by the amount of perspiration being shed, which could solve London’s water crisis overnight is properly treated.

The compromise breakfast. Coffee is bought but bagel is from home. Bagel sellers on stations never get the amount of sausage right. The correct amount is ‘lots’, deluged in mustard and HP. If you get the ratio right, you should be feeling slightly ill on the last bite, but find your snack too delicious to resist.


The trip is fantastic. The trains are new and have not had time to soak up generations of the scent of passenger. The trip is through the industrial centres of the country, so obviously all the factories are gone and all that is left are fields and a few heritage sites. And canals. The brightly coloured barges run along the brown watered canals and you can almost feel the waves of smug radiating off the bargees, be they holiday makers or simple barge folk taking a cargo of heroin to the city. One thing I had not noticed about the countryside before, it moves really quickly.

Runcorn station is hardly a glittering terminal, the sort of place one might expect film stars of the 1950s to have changed trains. It’s more the sort of place where you get off in a swirling fog and some inbred porter croaks that ‘nobody’s got off here for 20 years’ and then starts sharpening his hammer or something.

Basic rule of thumb, if a train station does not have a bar, you’re in the boonies.


What was nearby was a boozer. Even at a distance of 100 yards, my pub radar went ‘ping’ and I realised that to try and buy a pint there would be suicide, possibly not of the social variety. It did have a beer garden, and a flyover nearby, and what was even nearer was the flight path from Liverpool airport. There must be something about a plane roaring overhead every ten minutes and the possibility of being killed by a solid block of frozen urine that adds a certain frisson to your lager.



No shortage of water in the hospital grounds. The duck pond was depleted but still there, as were the ducks. At the weekend this place had families sitting by the bank fishing. A lovely, pastoral scene. They might have been bored out of their wits, but they were bored out of their wits together and that’s what matters.


Not sure about the sportsmanship of fishing from a shrinking pond though. If the heat wave continues surely you won’t need a fishing rod, a bucket will do. ‘Dredging’ hardly has the same connotations as fishin’ though.

Not much to say about the hospital. Never seen infection control like it, you had to use this alcohol gel wash on your hands every time you went in and out the ‘diseases of the nethers’ ward. This meant that the alcohol evaporating on your hands cooled them. Also wondered if one could absorb enough alcohol through skin to have effect of a large gin.



Certainly had enough beer on the trip home to cause that effect. There’s only ever one thing you can do on a long train journey home, when you do not have to impress strangers at the other end, and that’s drink.


Of course, four cans of cold lager sent me swaying (motion of the train) to what can only be described as a space-aged loo. Christ knows how I managed to get the door locked, the control panel looked like it had come from the space shuttle. Knobs and buttons and dials for water, air and god knows what. Was probably lucky not to flush self from train.

Drinking, reading and a loo that’s more of a challenge than nintendo - train really is the only way to travel.