Taking a slow train to long ago and far away

In some places it's still not the age of the train.

A million years ago — ok, fifty — one of my greatest pleasures was to catch the early-morning East Coast Main Line train from Edinburgh Waverley station to London King’s Cross. This may sound hard to believe but there was almost an air of excitement about making that journey. It was something of an adventure. It may even have played a part of changing my life.

There was the train, for starters. The fastest diesel-powered locomotive in history. British Rail — the pre-Thatcher nationalised rail company butchered by Maggie — introduced the legendary InterCity125 high speed passenger train. As its name suggests it had a top speed of 125 mph and a positively inspiring, uplifting quasi-operatic theme tune on its tv advert: WOW!!! 125 MILES PER HOUR we thought.

The catchline of British Rail in that ad was “This is the age of the train.” Hold onto that thought. We’ll come back to it later.

(I would have clipped the full ad into this rumination if it wasn’t for the fact that the face and voice of InterCity125 advertising was the once-upon-a-time Sir Jimmy Saville OBE. And we all know how badly that story ended. What a shit Sir Jimmy was.)

Anyway. Several elements combined to make my twenty years-old self (perhaps) overthink that far off moment. Or maybe not. Cos it might also have been real.

I thought I was beginning to experience life as I wanted (and still want) it to be. Purposeful.

The first time I made the journey (a bit before the 125 was on track … pun intended sorry) it was to attend the national conference of ‘Liberation’ (formerly the Movement for Colonial Freedom) held at Friends Meeting House in Bloomsbury. I remember being ‘star struck’ saying hello to Fenner Brockway And meeting my friend Yvonne Strachan (and Anti-Apartheid Movement employee back then) for the first time. Felt in awe of them both.

I remember the whole conference giving a tumultuous, never-ending standing ovation to the striking women at the centre of the Grunwick dispute. They had been locked out for a year by then because they’d chosen to join a trade union.

Striking women of Grunwick — locked out of their workplace for joining a union

Over the next few years, as I became more deeply involved in the Broad Left leadership group of the National Union of Students in Scotland, then London, I made the train trip more and more often.

Choose the right service and your day was made.

First: you could find a seat. The ninety minutes between Edinburgh and Newcastle on the first train were often nearly empty. No mobile phones back then. Peace and quiet.

Second: there’s the stretch of the line between the ruin of Tantallon Castle, near North Berwick, and Lindisfarne Island off Northumberland. The railway clings to the spectacular coastline looking out over the grey North Sea. One can get lost in that view.

Tantallon Castle, East Lothian … Cromwelled!! (Pic: Stephen C Dickson)

Third: the once-famous British Rail breakfast, served in the dining car. Sausage, bacon, fried eggs, tomatoes, baked beans and fried tattie scones (this being a Scottish train route). Black coffee strong enough to stand the spoon upright.

Bliss.

(I am willing to allow the possibility of my selective memory here. Dougie’s former life viewed through his rose-tinted spectacles. But, at times it felt that simple and good.)

Anyway. I mention my late-1970s / early-1980s train journeys only because we took the train from Canberra to Melbourne today. By which I mean THE WHOLE OF THE DAY.

Old man waiting on an old train in an even older Goulburn station

• 6:15 a.m. — wheelchair accessible taxi to Kingston railway station.

• 7:00 a.m. — NSW (slow) Trainlink — heading north — to Goulburn covering 93 kms (aka 58 miles) in 87 minutes, also known as an average of 40 miles per hour.

• 8:27 a.m. — pause for breakfast at the thoroughly pleasant The Roses Cafe in Goulburn: no sausages (pescatarian now) and no coffee (gone off it in the last quarter of a century) and no fried tattie scones (this being the colonies).

• 10:13 a.m. NSW Trainlink XPT — heading south — to Spencer Street (Southern Cross) train station by 6:30 p.m. That’s 341 miles (aka 545 kms) in 8 hours 17 minutes, also known as an average of 41.6 miles per hour.

• 6:30 p.m. to 7:10 p.m. — still on the train because … in Australia … this most definitely is NOT the age of the train… and we’re late.

Now here’s the thing. And on this matter, I quote the source of every verifiable, actual factoid in human history: Wikipedia.

The XPT (Express Passenger Train) based on the British Rail InterCity 125 … first entered service [in Australia] in January 1982.

1982 …

And, here I am, in Melbourne in 2026.

Today, I travelled by train from the capital city of the world’s thirteenth largest national economy on a train between the two largest cities in Australia. Each of those cities has a population larger than the entire population of Scotland.

The people who work in the stations, on the trains, on the telephone helpline are the nicest, friendliest, most helpful folk you could want to meet. But our journey took eleven and a half hours station to station. At an average speed of just over 40 miles per hour.

In a train from the 20th Century. A design of train that I first travelled on in 1977, when I was 20. And which, in Australia today (just like the trains in Scotland in 1977) does not — to all intents and purposes — have mobile phone reception or Internet access. But not for any good reason.

There is a quote I too often like to recall from the opening of the novel The Go Between.

The past is another country. They do things differently there.

The fact is that in that other country they did exactly the same thing back there and then as we do here and now. With exactly the same trains. But in 1977 on the East Coast Main Line, they did it up to three times faster than here, in Australia, today.

I can tell you this for sure. Yearning for home and nostalgia for the former things of yesteryear make for an old fool’s errand. Chew on that Odysseus. You wanna get home to Ithaca? Give me a 320 kilometre per hour State-owned French or Italian high speed rail network any and every day of the week.