I thought I knew a secret

Until today I thought that I was privy to a secret.

This was no trivial secret. This was not a hole in the roof that you don’t tell the person who buys your house about sort of secret. This is not the plan that somebody accidentally left in the photo-copier to close the factory where you’d been working since you were sixteen years old. This was a Colonel Sanders’s recipe for fried chicken, or the firmly drawn cross on a torn and tatty seventeenth century map that marked the exact location of Captain Kidd’s treasure, or the rotating book-case that explains everything in every second episode of Midsomer Murders sort.

A few weeks ago, I found out a way to go by train from Kingsknowe to Thatcham with only one ticket and without going through London.

To tell the truth, I did not discover this valuable nugget unaided. I did try. I spent hours trying to wrest a ticket from Kingsknowe to Thatcham avoiding London out of the National Rail website, but it defeated me. I sent an e-mail to National Rail asking how to buy the ticket I needed and within a day or two I had a reply.

Let me explain why I wanted the ticket. Kingsknowe is the nearest railway station to my house. Thatcham is the nearest station to where my daughter Tania used to live.

So, every so often I need to travel from Kingsknowe to Thatcham. The quickest route from Kingsknowe to Thatcham is to take the train from Edinburgh to London, cross London on the Underground and take another train from Paddington to Thatcham.

However, the most convenient route from Kingsknowe to Thatcham is not the quickest. It takes longer to catch the train from Edinburgh to Newcastle, then take another train from Newcastle to Reading, and finally take a fourth train on to Thatcham. But it avoids the staggering inconvenience of travelling from Kings Cross to Paddington on the London Underground, with its endless winding corridors, escalators, lifts, beggars, pick-pockets, drug dealers, drunks, staff who speak no English and trains in which passengers are packed closer together than the proverbial sardines in a tin.

Maps might make the issue a bit clearer:

This is the fastest route but I don’t want to go this way	This is the easiest route because it avoids London. There is a direct train from Newcastle to Reading. You don’t need to change trains in Birmingham.

Now, I’ll explain why you needed to know a secret.

This is how you normally buy a ticket on line, although you cannot escape using it by going to your nearest station and asking the booking clerk there to sell it to you, because he has to use the exact same computer program that you do. The form for buying a ticket is here: nationalrail.co.uk You start by filling in the names of your begin and end stations and the dates when you want to travel.
 

Then you click on ‘Show times and prices.’ (Note in passing that the site doesn’t use the word ‘fare’ like you and I do, which — like their confusing their ‘passengers’ with their ‘customers’ — contributes to the impression you sometimes get that the people who put themselves in charge of the privatised shambles which our railways have become know nothing whatever about trains.)
 

The computer magically shows you a list of trains that you can travel on, and it asks you to pick one. In this case, the first journey it finds begins with the 09:37 from Kingsknowe, with three changes of train. Those are in Edinburgh, London Kings Cross and London Paddington, an excruciating journey if you have luggage, or a wheel-chair.
 

Look again at the first train that it suggests, the 09:37 from Kingsknowe. That gets you to Edinburgh, and there you are supposed to take the 10:30 to Kings Cross. It does not tell you that if you get off the 10:30 to Kings Cross when it stops in Newcastle at 11:55, a train to Reading will be waiting for you, and it will set off at 12:33 and convey you to Reading, sparing you the horrors of travelling through London.

Once upon a time, if you knew the secret, you could take that easier and sensibler route. Here is the secret. As I found out when I tried to buy a return through ticket from Kingsknowe to Thatcham at Haymarket station in Edinburgh, even the station staff didn’t know it.

Not that it matters any more, because the secret stopped working some time in the last couple of weeks.
 

On the first screen, above the station names, there is a link, ‘Route Options.’ You click that. A hidden row appears, the book-case rotates, the spade strikes the brass handle of the coffin in which Captain Kidd laid his treasures, a disgruntled sous-chef hands over the secret recipe in exchange for a five pound note and a pack of six British made razor blades. In the hidden row you choose ‘Change At’ and you type ‘Newcastle.’
 

That used to work. The computer asked you whether you wanted to change at Newcastle and take the direct train to Reading. But now, it doesn’t.
 

Take a look — again — at that 09:37 departure from Kingsknowe. The computer actually suggests that, since you want to change at Newcastle, you get off the London train at Newcastle, wait for the next train to London and get onto that. You have to make exactly the same journey on the Underground from Kings Cross to Paddington, only an hour later. The possibility of an easier ride avoiding London no longer gets a mention. Though, to be fair, the computer does notice that you can avoid London if you take the 12:33 from Kingsknowe.

This means it is impossible to buy a ticket for that train from Kingsknowe to Thatcham avoiding London, because you have to be able to find the train you want to travel on before you can buy a ticket. You need a ticket, not just to show that you have paid the fare (or price) but also because with the ticket comes a seat reservation, essential on the notoriously over-subscribed Cross Country service, which has only three second class coaches and without a seat reservation you’ll be standing in the aisle or the vestibule for four and a half hours. Therefore, in order to make the journey, you have to buy two tickets, as I did, one from Kingsknowe to Newcastle and the other from Newcastle to Thatcham. That in turn means you pay more for two tickets than you would have paid for one, and if you miss the connection at Newcastle because the train from Edinburgh ran late, your second ticket is not valid on whichever train to Reading you finally leave Newcastle on.

So, here is the punch line. I suspect this is a more common problem than just this one instance, though I have no evidence: computer errors, like city buses or bananas, come in bunches. As things appear to stand, there exist a number of train journeys along permitted routes for which no tickets can be purchased, because the ticket sales depend on software that doesn’t work. As artificial intelligence struggles and fails dismally at jobs which human beings used to accomplish with ease, the impossibility of buying a train ticket offers a terrifying glimpse of the world that is waiting for us.

A marvellous invention that hasn’t been invented yet: Anti-gravity shoes make it possible to float gracefully above the mud and puddles

Engineering fantasy: Private trains for very rich people

A Train for Very Rich Passengers

You can have luxury, but it has a price tag:
Fares on the famous Brighton Belle were higher than ordinary fares on the same route

According to this news story, residents of the town of Farnborough, a small village in southern England and officially a district of Greater London, are pretty tired of the constant noise that issues from their local airport.

Yet here, the story takes an unexpected turn. Farnborough does not have an airport. That is, it has an airport, but not one that most of us could use, even if we had to get to Farnborough in a tremendous hurry. Farnborough Airport is for VRPs only. Very Rich Passengers. Only private planes use it.

It seems that the market for astronomically expensive travel is expanding, and for that reason, to the chagrin of all who live below their flight path and believe that bus fares are far too expensive, Farnborough Airport is planning to increase the number of week-end and Bank Holiday flights from 8,900 per year to 13,500, half as many again. Which, of course, is why the residents of Farnborough are terrified of the racket that is to come.

 

Britain is a small and crowded island, and perhaps private aeroplanes are not the best way for people, even VRPs, to get around. I suggest that we should bring back the private train.

In the nineteenth century, numerous rich people owned their own trains and used them to travel anywhere they wanted. In recent years the only remaining privately owned trains, so far as I know, have been those operated for the entertainment of railway enthusiasts. Billionaire Jeremy Hosking owns the rake of carriages that used to form the Caledonian Sleeper, and the Royal Family still has a private train, but it will be decommissioned in 2027.

So, forget about private aeroplanes. They are just so last century. Let us bring back the private train. Even more expensive than a private jet, it is a stylish and moderately useful status symbol. Let the homes of the super rich and the places to which they travel be served by spurs of track from the nearest main line. In place of the unbearable noise from one jet engine after another passing overhead, let’s hear the rumble of diesel engines or, even better, the slow chuff, chuff, chuff of steam locomotives hauling their carriages away from the VRP Only platforms immediately outside the football grounds and the concert halls and the nightclubs where their super-rich owners perform.

Of course we shall also need VRPs Only railway stations in our principal cities, and such stations still exist in various stages of disintegration. If only they hadn’t demolished Broad Street and Kings Cross York Road, they would have been ideal VRP Only stations serving the north of the city of London. The former international platforms at Waterloo could still form a VRPs Only station serving the south of London.

Broad Street station in the City of London, now demolished	King’s Cross York Road station, now derelict	The international platforms at Waterloo, still intact but put to another use

Of course, rebuilding those stations would be expensive, and so would laying down the tracks to the venues of various events and to some expensive houses, but the government tends to have money lying around for the transport of rich people: remember Concorde and the Queen Elizabeth 2. It is everyone else whose train and bus services are a luxury in which the taxpayer can no longer afford to indulge.

It would be a useful side effect of this renovation programme that new buildings would be built closer to railway stations than they are now, making travel easier for everyone.

A private train costs about £5 million, not including all the fittings and furnishings necessary to turn it into a mobile home, office, bedroom and performance space with room for a crew of three or four. What’s more, if the figures from the Royal Train are roughly correct, it costs about four times as much to travel in a private train as it does to travel in a private jet. That means that for a VRP looking to display his wealth and social status rather than actually to go anywhere, a private train, and travelling on it, is a very effective status symbol — and, unlike an aeroplane, if you paint your name in big letters on the side of a train, everyone along the route will be able to read it.

Of course, my purpose in writing this post is not just to make a suggestion that would save the ears of Farnborough’s residents a good deal of splitting. It is also an excuse for drawing some pictures. Here are the pictures: click on them to see the full size versions.

A two car multiple unit ideal for purchase, re-fitting and use as a private, personal vehicle	The internal arrangements of the two car multiple unit
Private trains pick up their very rich passengers from their homes
Private trains pick up their very rich passengers from their homes
Private trains pick up their very rich passengers from their homes		A few minutes before kick-off, the away team arrives in their personal train
A famous cricketer arrives at the Test Match in his private train	The star of the film arrives at the illustrious Premiere	A celebrity couple arrives at an expensive basement night-club

This simple device reduces the weight of your groceries so that you can carry a week’s shopping home effortlessly.

AI generated pictures of trains

Today I spent a couple of hours getting Creator.Nightcafé to draw pictures of trains. I thought the results were pretty impressive. Click the small pictures to display the big pictures in a new window.