Going Off The Rails

After a hiatus of the best part of five years I find myself once again in the position of motorist commuter.

Having forsaken the myriad delights which public transport - and S*uth W*st Tr*ins in particular - has to offer I'm back on the roads.

Of course, when I say "myriad delights", I do obviously mean "thoroughly nasty, overpriced, third world experience somewhat akin to taking six inch galvanised nails and repeatedly hammering them into my eyeballs whilst dribbling caustic soda in through the resulting wounds".

It's safe to say that I am somewhat disillusioned with the train service in this country and when circumstances dictated that the opportunity to avoid it might arise, I seized it in the same way a drowning man might clutch at driftwood on a boiling sea.

On and off I have been a commuter into London from various parts of Surrey's infamous Stockbroker Belt for the best part of eighteen years - the majority of that time on the same line from Portsmouth to London Waterloo.

This period of time has seen a number of changes to the railway system - most notably the break-up & privatisation of the network by the Conservative government which came into effect in 1996.

This act of sheer genius (irony detectors to maximum) resulted in British Rail being replaced by a number of Train Operating Companies, each running services in various parts of the country on a franchise basis whilst the physical infrastructure - the railway itself - was parcelled up like the dream Hornby set of young boys' dreams of yore and sold to another, publicly-listed company called, imaginatively-enough, Railtrack.

(I should imagine that some achingly-trendy, spectacle-wearing bell-end with red braces, a cocaine habit capable of financing the national debt of Bolivia and called something like 'Seb' came up with that one - no doubt after having been paid a shed-load of tax-payers' cash..)

But I digress..

Suffice it to say that what was once a dirty, grimy but generally cohesive (yet often poorly) publicly-funded railway system became overnight a dirty, grimy (still often poorly) privately-funded 'business opportunity'.

Where once beleagured travellers were addressed (if at all) as 'passengers', they were now, in this new wonderfully-shiny capitalist transport utopia to be known as 'customers'.

However, whilst the old maxim of 'The customer is always right' might still live on in the hearts of some parts of the business community, its cadaverous corpse which clung barely to life under the last vestiges of BR was put very much out of its misery by the new regime.

From now on the customer was not right, rather he or she was a legitimate target for legalised extortion as the train operating companies and their shareholders set about the business of recovering the squillions of pounds they'd paid Major & co for the privilege of transporting the proles about the place.

And so it came to pass that railway passengers...I'm sorry, customers set off on their journeys in the newly-painted but still generally shitty old British Rail rolling stock whose wheels clattered over the same old (but newly-owned) rails as they commuted back and forth from wherever they worked or, if they were lucky, played.

Fast forward to today and whilst the landscape's changed a bit, it's still the same old story - overcrowding, late-running and a King's ransom for the privilege.

For the princely sum of £3000 (GBP) annually yours truly could travel backwards and forwards to west London via a combination of the afore-mentioned S*uth W*st Tr*ins and London Underground/Overground (the latter being formerly known as Silverlink and employing 30 year old ex-BR rolling stock which looked suspiciously as if it had last been refurbished by a Soviet planning committee in the early 1980s).

This ability to travel carried the usual caveats of weather and track conditions, staff availability, strikes, floods, rivers of blood, plagues of locusts and so on which would invariably impede progress at some point along the way.

And accompanying this dazzlingly expensive opportunity to go nowhere fast would be the ability to do it in a fair degree of discomfort.

Overcrowding in rush hours would be the normal situation - trains formed of less carriages than they should due to some mechanical malady or other, regularly accomodating many more passeng..customers than comfort, or indeed safety would deem fit would resound to the tutting, sighing or muttering of the long-suffering commuter, as once again, they experienced the delights of standing up in close proximity to a personal-hygiene-phobe talking loudly into a mobile telephone in what was laughingly labelled a 'quiet carriage'.

To be honest, I got a bit pissed off with it.

So, when the imminent arrival of our first born coincided with the expiry of my annual season ticket, I decided that driving might be the answer. I could get back home a lot more quickly if needed and by my rough back of a fag packet calculations it would be cheaper too.

Therefore, I now find myself saving money, not having to share personal space with those of a more anti-social nature and having more spare time to spend with my family into the bargain.

Yes, the roads are often nightmarish - traffic volumes are growing and driving standards are increasingly starting to make me wonder whether a driving test ought to be a yearly requirement rather than the one-off licence to wreak havoc which currently suffices, but I'm in my own little box, listening to whatever podcast took my fancy whilst trawling iTunes the evening before, but most importantly I'm not having to listen to some little waste of perfectly good DNA's Samsung mobile phone pissing out a tinny rendition of the latest R & B release with which he's trying to impress the slack-jawed, skinny jean-wearing personality vacuum who's sprawled all over him, whilst swigging from a luridly-coloured bottle of WKD.

That, in itself is worth sitting on the A3 for a few minutes looking at the back of a Ukrainian-registered artic.

Mind how you go now.