Okay, so the trains in the UK aren't so crap...

Yesterday I went to a DFEY meeting in Manchester and only two people turned up, myself and the organiser Tim Dobson.... what a bust; following an afternoon spent in the park chatting with Tim and Ian Forrester I've decided to start my blog up again. I took the train there and back and had rather comfortable journeys, sure the trains were made in Sweden and the track it was running on had probably been put together by convicts being payed the minimum wage but it was a good journey and from my experience superior to many of the trains in Europe! The trains weren't so stupidly long that I had trouble finding my carriage before the train itself departed, I didn't have to worry that the train was about to rip apart after hearing the compression and worrying expansion of the carriage's plastic interior whenever the train accelerated and I most certainly did not run out of battery power on my laptop! In the European rail network there seems to be a trend of spending all the money on the busy routes that businessmen travel on and then leaving the rest of the networrk with 30 year old rollingstock; sure it brings about cheaper train fares but if you're travelling between any two cities in the UK you don't feel like cattle, you feel comfortable and like a passenger. The seats in the Pendelino are surprisingly more comfrotable than those of the German ICEs and although we don't have a restaurant car on many trains, the quality and variety of food on the British rail network still seems to outstrip anything on the ICEs or, God forbid, the Swiss Inter-Regio trains.

My point: be happy with the British railway system; it may not be the fastest or cheapest in the world but it isn't bad!