online: 22 june 2009 modified: 22, 25 june 2009 18 june 2009 industrial living
a train to Wales
...irritated by nearly every aspect of this journey so far... from London to Birmingham (and then to Wales) via poor attempts at modernisation that have turned booking systems, stations and vehicles into a prison-like experience...
...it would take me hours to describe the number of things that i find irritating today... from the forced options that made ticket booking a struggle until finally it dispensed 7 nearly identical 'coupons' (in place of the single return ticket that i expected)... to the to me depressing sight from the train of the cities of Milton Keynes, Birmingham and Wolverhampton...
...but i can't bring myself to describe all this poor quality artifice, or rubbish... the apparent failure of my generation and previous ones to construct a human way of living in the 20th and 21st centuries... i now prefer to attempt something positive, however small or insignificant, that is a remedy to at least some of all this...
...but now i look out to find that the local train from Birmingham to Wales is speeding cheerfully through green fields of young crops... and through railway cuttings planted with thousands of trees and bushes and spontaneous undergrowths rushing past the window... then the train stops unexpectedly between stations and one can see foxgloves and elder flowers and hawthorns and gorse and dog daisies... and now we pass through Telford where we stop briefly for a few passengers after moving slowly past a parking ground where scores of private cars wait all day unused while their owners go to work by train and return in the evening... yes this semi-rural life of commuting is perhaps less unpleasant, but it too is open to the almost total criticism that the whole way of industrial life has provoked throughout my lifetime...
...now entering the dilapitated 19th century shunting yards of Shrewsbury station - in front of the prison... (or is it the castle built to keep the Welsh out of the greater part of their land that became England... for this is a border town between conqueror and conquered... now at peace but still uneasy)... as we wait in a side platform for local people to change trains and for this train to reverse direction... i see a railwaywoman with a baton to permit a departing train to move onto a stretch of single line track as i feel this train set off again past a still-operating semaphore signal that is almost a museum piece...
...then a kindly voice on a crackly loud speaker system explains fully and slowly that when the train reaches the coast some carriages will be detached and go to North Wales while the others go south to Aberystwyth (my hometown and now a terminus)...
...and a few miles from here i will meet again my sister and her family... and later we will visit her husband who is in hospital...
for comfortable line length set the window to about two-thirds of the screen width
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