The 8.35 and the 8.35 c)

By STRIX H EY'D all have to be very big men,' said Dick.

'And they'd all have to have bushy eyebrows,' Colin pointed out.

'The eyebrows could be stuck on,' I snapped. When formulating a project which will confer untold benefits upon the nation one does not want to waste time discussing petty and easily superable difficulties.

Our conversation, which took place a short time ago after dinner, arose from the fact that on the 7th/8th September the night express from Inverness to London arrived at King's Cross on time. Dick, who regularly travels by this train, was not prepared to describe the achievement as unprecedented; all he would say was that it was outside his own experienCe as a passenger and that he had never, since nationalisation, met anyone who claimed to have reached London punctually on that train.

He had himself been on it on that memorable night of the 7th. When he boarded it he asked the sleeping-car attendant, an acquaintance of many years' standing, how late the train was going to be this time.

'We shall be either dead on time, sir,' said the man, 'or a few minutes early. Sir Brian Robertson's on the train.'

They were five minutes early. Whether there is anything in the legend, now current in the High- lands, that the express was propelled by three engines I am not in a position to say.

Dick's experience had suggested to him that tremendous advantages would accrue to the travelling public if there were more Sir Brian Robertsons using our splendid railway system. He felt—and Colin and I agreed with him, as must all true patriots—that the obstacle of Sir Brian's singleton status could be overcome with the help of a small corps of retired officers and out-of-work actors, suitably proportioned and suitably disguised. They would be deployed by a central headquarters in accordance with a care- fully co-ordinated plan; and although, like all guerrillas who are not supported by regular forces, their operations would be subject to a law of diminishing returns, they might at least bring about a brief honeymoon with punctuality. 1 remembered rather wrily the wide-ranging Scope of our post-prandial deliberations when, a week or two later, I myself fell into the clutches of British Railways. On the Wednesday I arrived, not by rail, at a place thirty-five miles from Aberdeen for three days' grouse-shooting. I aimed to travel south by the night train on Saturday and lost no time in telephoning to see whether I could book a sleeper. British Railways said, as apparently they always do, that none was available but they would put my name on the waiting list; I was to ring them again on Friday and see if I had had any luck.

Leaving nothing to chance, I rang them on Thursday. A different voice said that my name was not on the waiting list but it would be put there. On Friday I was told that there were still no sleepers free but I had a good prospect of getting one in the first class. On Saturday morning they said that I had no chance whatever of a sleeper; there were fifty names on the waiting list.

This was a matter of comparative indifference to me, for I sleep with great facility under almost any conditions; and that evening I set out by taxi in a mellow mood to catch the 8.35. An earlier train for London leaves at 7.5, but the 8.35 is the one normally used by the carriage trade. A fellow-guest had left by it on the pre- vious evening, and in the intervals between drives I had heard its merits and demerits discussed in some detail by the lairds of Dee-side and Don- side.

Picture, therefore, my mortification to discover on arriving at the station that the 8.35 had sud- denly become Saturdays Excepted. Brian may argue that I brought the resultant inconvenience and expense upon myself by my failure to scrutinise with sufficient care the small type in his latest time-tables; but I had after all had four telephone conversations with his staff about travelling to London that night, and it is difficult to explain their omission to warn me that my train had been cancelled except by assuming that they had failed to notice the fact themselves. It was certainly unknown to the head waiter at the Station Hotel, whose nightly duty it is (for the 8.35 has no dining car) to see that his patrons catch it and who, until he had telephoned the station, courteously refused to accept my state- ment that it would not run that night.

BEA had no southbound flight on the next day. After a morose night in the Station Hotel I caught a different 8.35, which leaves Aberdeen in the morning and is due at King's Cross at 9.5 p.m. My home is forty miles from London and over the telephone I told my son, who was going to meet me with a car, to check the train's ETA with British Railways before he left for King's Cross; it was clearly unwise to take any- thing for granted.

No one at the station could tell me anything about the prospects of my train keeping its schedule. The guard was at first vaguely re- assuring but later produced a printed document dealing with temporary aberrations from the time-table; this showed that because of repairs to the line the Sunday train to London was not due there until 10.36. This was still the party line when we reached York forty minutes late.

At dusk we rather unexpectedly passed through Lincoln; the journey had become a sort of Mystery Tour. A far from appetising dinner took just under two hours to serve. The gravy-spotted wine list had 'The Talisman' on its cover.

'Is this train called The Talisman?' I asked the steward, remembering vaguely that this was the name of a crack express.

'Not on Sundays, sir,' he said.

It was half past eleven when we drew into King's Cross, two and a half hours after the ad- vertised time. I found a barrow and wheeled my luggage down a platform rendered semi-impass- able by piles of freight awaiting despatch or removal.

'Lucky I told you to check the ETA,' I said when reunited with my son. 'As a matter of in- terest, what time did they tell you we should get in?'

'9.5' was the answer.

I hope I am not an exigent traveller, nor wholly unaware of the post-war legacy of difficulties, with which the railways have to contend. But to accept provisionally, and thrice, a passenger's request for accommodation on a train which does not exist seems to me ridiculously inefficient; and if you have to re-route a train so that you know, well in advance, that it cannot possibly be less than an hour and a half late, it is surely your duty to impart this knowledge to those who travel on it.

The word Schwindelreise, or swindle-journey, has stuck in my head ever since, years ago, I saw it used by a German journalist to describe an expedition of which a bogus account had been given to the public by its organisers.- I am grateful to British Railways for providing a context in which—without, I feel, unduly straining its sense —I can at last employ this agreeable word.