The delay was not unexpected. Trains are not reliable on this, their nursery island. They have found themselves constrained by choices made in their proud and peacock-strutting youth, mistakes which their slower-growing contemporaries managed to avoid. Once the energy of youth ran out, they found themselves disappointingly slow, cramped and uncomfortable, and quite incapable of changing anything about those facts. A British train must have its regrets, is what I’m getting at.

I like our trains. They’re certainly a good deal more relatable than those sleek and shiny double-decker show offs of The Continent and Japan. And they don’t have the same kicked-dog, step-sonnish, unloved air of Amtrak, always second in the affections of the travelling American to the younger sibling of aviation. No, a British train is a reflection of the British character, and our character is shaped by our trains. I personally think that the British resignation to all incompetencies systemical comes from a lifetime of training by lack-of-train, all the hours spent sucking in the communal air of grey waiting rooms, with their weirdly carpeted seats and teams of clawless pigeons fighting over Wotsits crumbs. Many’s the time when, on hearing that an appointment has been arbitrarily cancelled or a vital document has been accidentally shredded, I have replied in an enigmatic half-sigh that ‘the twelve-seventeen to Colchester has been delayed, indefinitely.’

Still, for all that love of and resignation to the qualities of our transit, hearing such words as I have sighed come from the tin-can throat of a station announcer is enough to make the heart sink. So to the waiting room I went, and sat among the birds. There I stayed, grasping hungrily at the fastness of my chair, while all around me the tidepool of humanity rose and fell with the coming and going of the trains.

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