Manchester by rail...standard class!

Ahh, the romance of train travel! Clouds of steam, assignations in the dining car, genteel murder, stoking, assignations in the luggage car, gin, amusing incidents in the sleeper compartment, bribing the border guards and, of course, thanks to terrorists and strict border controls, it's still the best way to smuggle smack or shooters into the country.

Modern day train travel has much to commend it. There's the quiet carriage, where mobile phones and, apparently, loudly rustling your crisp packet is frowned upon to the point of Paddington hard stares or second degree tutting. There's the buffet car, with it's cornucopia of snacks meaning that some offer up to three flavours of crisps to compliment your twelve cans of Stella.

Recently, I had to travel up north for work. I love the train journey up north. You go through what is now a deprived area of the country but what was once a glorious industrial powerhouse. That's one of the reasons why there is a railway track there at all and also the reason why for so much of the journey the railway runs alongside the canal network. Railways were laid alongside the canals they would eventually replace because the navvies had already done all the hard work of levelling the area, building embankments, finding the best pubs and composing folk songs.

Previously I'd done the trip first class. Not this time though, this was austerity Britain and I was under the distinct impression that my class of travel was one above having to shovel coal into the engine for 200 miles. Or whatever.

The view, however, was still first class. England was in the grip of winter and there had been a hard frost that night, now the same clear skies that brought the frost let the sun illuminate it in dazzling style. You could see the cold, the white countryside, the breath of the cattle and, in the canals, a thin skien of almost ice on the iron dark chill waters.

Inside all was jolly and warm. First class travel means that you get fed and watered. Tea and coffee and coffee and tea and a hot breakfast. Not so in standard class. Luckily I am a man of immense resource and enviable pic nic skills and so using only the most basic of amenities; a M&S simply food, a coffee shop and an artisan bakers, had cobbled together a light three course breakfast.

Then, as we left the station, came the announcement that because the catering crew has missed the train, there would be no catering, at all, on the journey. The howls went up from first class while, sitting in a fug of smug, I debated whether to eat my BLT or auction it.

I ate it, of course, and enjoyed the view. But I wonder if future travellers will have that same opportunity. The canals today are used for holidays and colourful narrowboats putter along, a reminder of a time when the world moved at a slower pace. I can't see the holiday makers of the future getting away from it all on a motorway cruise, although journey times might be similar.

One of the more colourful sights was, in the middle of an expanse of what at first appeared to be suspiciously well groomed countryside but was, of course, a golf course, two golfers striding forth across the frozen fairways. Colourful trousers making an impression in the black and white surroundings, clouds of breath steaming over their shoulders like the puffs that would have come from my train decades ago. They must really love their game, or have really shit home lives.

It was refreshing, at journey's end, to see the northern city I was visiting in the sunshine for the first time ever. No kidding. The place looked transformed. But no wonder they shot 'life on Mars' there. It was like going back to the 1970s. Everyone was smoking (remember smoking?) and everyone was overweight, probably due to the wheezy queue that seemed to be a permanent feature outside the door of Greggs. Not that I blame them, if I hadn't of feasted on a BLT that morning, I might of joined them.