I can't take the strain any more, so I am learning to drive

I, don't know how come the train companies lost me, but they have. And if they've lost me there can't be many people left still travelling by

train. I can't drive, for a start. Sitting in a car makes me feel like I feel when I watch Peter Mandelson on television. I hate it. I claw at the windows and champ down on the bile, sometimes unsuccessfully. And then, trains are in the family. My grandfather was a train driver; my dad worked for British Rail and so did my uncle and I was eight years old before my family bought a car. Cars, you see, in our view, were nowt. My dad came from Stockton and his dad from Darlington — you can't get more locomotive than that. My grandfather would let me sit with him in the cabin of the big steam trains sometimes, and as a small child I spent whole days hanging around Darlington station, just watching and talking to the drivers, who were my heroes. I loved trains. Still do.

But, on 23 May, it's the end of the affair. That's when the summer timetable comes in. A timetable is what the train companies use to ruin your professional and sometimes social life. The new one will have different times from the old one, but the trains themselves won't pay any attention. They'll just carry on doing what they always do — being late.

Oh, and 23 May is also the date on which my regular service, South West Trains, introduce a smoking ban throughout their fleet. 'Why are you doing this?' I asked the press officer.

'Because of feedback from our customers,' he said.

'What sort of feedback? You did a survey? Nobody asked me.'

'General feedback. And it's in line with most of the other companies.'

General feedback, indeed. Lies, all lies. They're going to lose a lot of passengers. And they'll lose more money on top of that, stuff they hadn't thought about. The refreshment-trolley people tell me their revenue from the tiny smoking compartment is much higher than from the rest of the train, where the people all sit rigid and grim-faced, terrified of death and sternly eschewing alcohol and cheese'n'chive flavoured Pringles. From now on, it's their train entirely. The Misery Train. Well, they can keep it.

But the smoking ban isn't the main reason I'm giving up the ghost of George Stephenson. The main reason is you just can't trust trains and haven't been able to for some time. In the last year or so I've missed or been horribly late for countless meetings because of signal failures at Overton, or a circuit failure at Clapham, or the driver not turning up, or one of any other myriad excuses for utter and complete uselessness. And then you look at their punctuality reports, posted proudly on the stadon platforms, and they tell you it's 85 per cent and you wonder what world you, or they, are living in. Very, very different worlds, leastwise.

I did my own survey of 80 train journeys completed in the last four months and covering a grand total of nine train operators. The overall punctuality rate was 30 per cent — by which I mean that only 30 per cent of the trains arrived at the time they claimed they would, which is different from the train companies' conception of punctuality. They say 'arriving within five minutes of the scheduled time'. Once you factor in this little deceit, my figure goes up to almost 60 per cent. Which means that 40 per cent of trains were, in my book, very late.

My survey started badly, on the first Saturday after Christmas, when the Alphaline train from Warminster to Bath didn't turn up at all, so I took a taxi. This gave me a moral problem: do I include non-trains in my survey, or only ones which actually make it to the station?

And then, a week or so later, the 1603 South West Trains service from Waterloo to Salisbury was cancelled. 'Do you know why?' I asked the uniformed chap at the information desk, a little chippily. 'Yes sir. It's because of a death at Clapham Junction,' I was told with great sanctimony. Suitably chastened, I went away and only later discovered that the death had occurred on the tracks six hours earlier. I don't mean to be callous, but were the South West trains staff still in mourning or something? I travelled on Virgin trains to Stoke and, bizarrely, defying expectation, it arrived on time. I paid the price of a small cottage in the Cotswolds to travel by GNER to Darlington from King's Cross, a sentimental journey — and that was on time too. Those were the highlights of a dismal quarter of a year.

I went by First Great Western from Westbury to London and it was, as ever, 50 minutes late. It is always 50 minutes late and, what's more, exorbitantly expensive. In my experience it is by some margin the worst train service in the world, slower than Amtrak, dearer, mile for mile, than Kuwaiti Air, less reliable than George Best. I chickened out and travelled on FGW only once for my survey. I mean, why poke the snake?

And I travelled on Silverlink, and whatever it is that replaced Connex, and the strange Ivor the Engine operation that is Wales and the West.

Much as I'd expected, South West Trains performed pretty well throughout the four months. Despite my frustration, you can see the germ of a decent service here. It is comparatively cheap, there are plenty of trains and its reliability and punctuality I put at about 70 per cent. But 70 per cent still isn't good enough — and they should have had the courage to hold out against the anti-smoking lobby. The press officer told me they had regular meetings with rail-passenger committees — and therein, I think, lies the problem. Can you imagine the sort of people who would wish to spend an evening attending a rail-passengers' committee meeting, with its table stocked with bottled carbonated water and shortbread biscuits and terrifying, bottomless sheaves of minutes and agenda? Can you conceive of wanting to socialise with such people? I'll bet you that's where the antismoking stuff originated.

So my provisional driving licence is in the post. I had a couple of driving lessons 15 years ago and the first one consisted of this babe called Corinna telling me how to get in and out of a car and how to do up my seat belt. When I got home, I cried for hours. Why do people go through such mental torture? I asked myself.

But now there is no alternative. At least, henceforth, I'll be able to smoke until I choke, or crash, and if I'm late it'll be nobody else's fault but my own. I can live with that. And yes, Grandad, I'm truly sorry.