On our recent voyage around parts of Germany, Austria, Switzerland & Liechtenstein, K & I were quite pleased at the ease with which we negotiated rail travel. Everything was timely and spacious, and for the most part well connected (excepting finding a way out of Bregenz).
Currently, however, we’re taking some weird elongated diversion back from Stoke-on-Trent, via Birmingham International and Coventry. We got on the train at 15:10, and our arrival into Euston is presently estimated at 19:50 (assuming the rails don’t get covered in fluff from Saturn, or any other such standard calamity). Not bad, when you consider that the journey up here on Wednesday only took 1.5 hours.
Oh, and thanks to the bizarrely narrow wheelbase of UK trains, I suspect I’m now engaged to half of the people I was just rubbing up against in the bar carriage. Yes siree, you can’t beat UK rail for frottage opportunity.
Sometimes one ponders whether we’d be better off had WW2 gone the other way… Then again, half the UK rail franchises are run by French companies, so perhaps there’s more (or less) to it.
“Luckily”, I have 6 years’ worth of Viz magazines here to get by with. Pulitzer Prize, here comes I!
Oh, and in the unlikely event this ever gets read by the knuckle-dragger working in the B’ham Int’l branch of Subway – time to go back to Sandwich Art classes mate. It’s a well established system: the customer lists the ingredients they want, you put them on the bread. There is no scope for improvising.
