Choo-choo! All aboard the train of progress!

There are plenty of occasions to witness society’s gradual decay. Prime among these is when travelling on our nation’s trains.

As is the same with many technologies, railways are something that we pioneered once upon a time but have now left to Johnny Foreigner to excel in. Take the jet engine – in 1944 the Messerschmitt Me-262 was the first operational fighter jet despite the technology being invented by Frank Whittle in 1930.

Or, perhaps, football: despite it being our gift to the world we have rarely been shown any mercy on the pitch. Incessantly optimistic incantations of ‘it’s coming home’ are proving less punctual than the average train departing Birmingham New Street.

Yet of all the stations in the country there can be few more depressing than Euston, perfectly encapsulating as it does the decline of the nation. Its former terminal building – a mid-19^th century classically styled hall – was ripped down in the 1960s to make way for ‘progress’ in the shape of a hideous box, to stand inside which is reminiscent of standing inside a giant egg carton. Goodbye columned porticos and elegant staircases, hello urban squalor.

Long-gone: Euston’s old hall

Allegorical statues populated the old Great Hall, representing the major towns and cities serviced by the station. A carving of Britannia herself was inside the hall, too. There are no such statues in the station now, and one wonders what kind of allegories could be conjured up for the urban settlements whose train lines terminate at Euston.

Dreadful architecture and roundabouts for Milton Keynes? Multitudes of mosques and slip roads for Birmingham? For a budding young sculptor the possibilities are ceaseless.

Euston today - lovely!

In recent years some dosh has been spent trying to make the station less gruesome. This has led to some improvement, admittedly, but we all know you cannot polish a you-know-what.

Recently sitting in the Fuller’s pub in Euston while waiting for a train, I watched the world go by from my pitiful vantage point. Within my ten-or-so minutes sitting there, I witnessed a drug deal take place. It was a helpful reminder that if something looks odd, it probably is: why was that chap walking around with his beanie hat obscuring the top half of his face? Because, 60 seconds later I found out, he was peddling crack outside Pret-a-Manger.

On the train back home things hardly improved. British trains are largely designed with the intention of ferrying commuters from A to B: they are glorified livestock transporters. Any conception of travelling in comfort or glamour can be dispensed in favour of stinking toilets, cramped seating and chewing gum laden upholstery.

More often than not, it is also rammed. The whole of humanity, it seems, is desperate to get on the last not-soul-crushingly-slow train of the evening. To be on such a train is to witness, also, the demographic changes of the land: while Mr Farage was once castigated for commenting on the plethora of tongues spoken on our nation’s public transport (for to notice the obvious is one of the great modern sins), it is only possible not to notice if your head is buried ostrich-like in the seat (which I would not recommend, given their filthy state).

While I haven’t walked round, clipboard in hand, asking the citizenship and immigration status of each fellow passenger, it strikes me that a good proportion of those onboard are here by virtue of the rapid shift of our nation’s make up. Such make me intensely sceptical of government immigration statistics; they seem so out of kilter with what I see day-to-day in middle England that I prefer to rely on what may be my very subjective personal experience.

I am not sure if Babel had a good public transport network – presumably they needed one when God scattered its inhabitants across each corner of the Earth – but it is doubtful whether our is much better than theirs would have been. To have a rail journey unimpacted by some kind of works or strikes is to win a small lottery of fate. So routine are the disruptions that one cannot rely on public transport in any meaningful sense. The eco wazzocks want to rob you of your private transport while leaving you reliant upon the unreliable.

This is not to mention the ludicrous London-centric nature of our public transport. Take Northampton and Cambridge: they are one hour apart by car but to get their by train requires changing in the capital, and to get there by bus can only be accomplished if one wishes to dedicate the best part of a day to the endeavour.

Mr Beeching’s ‘progress’ was, as ‘progress’ so often is, a step backwards. That contradiction – of promised betterments to our lot turning out to be a degradation – seems to be a depressingly common feature of our lives.

It’d be nice to say I want a leader who makes the trains run on time, but I fear people would take it the wrong way. Never mind. It looks like we’re destined to be stuck with this poorly run behemoth anyway. Maybe Labour’s re-nationalisation will make everything better, but, somehow, I doubt it.

If you want to see how train travel should be, go to China or Japan. Like with so many things they make us look second world.