With Beeching to Caledonia
There was, I discovered, no dining-car on the Saturday night train (ETD 1940 hours) from Euston to Inverness, but I was well placed in the long queue for the buffet where a single- handed attendant tirelessly cut sandwiches (ham or cheese) and I had little more than twenty minutes to wait before drawing my rations. Sharing them with my dog, I tocik stock of the first-class compartment which we had to our- selves. The coach was a modern one, but the design of its fittings struck me as not only dreary but impractical. Although there was plenty of head-room, the upper luggage-rack was too narrow to take a decent-sized suitcase and the lower one only made sense on the assumption that most passengers needed somewhere to stow their salmon-rods, their parasols or their assegais. There were no hooks to hang coats on. The bat- tered iron receptacles for cigarette ash—tiny, im- mensely strong and perfectly hideous--had clearly been stripped from older rolling-stock on its way to the scrapyard. The legend 'Flits': plainly visible on the windows of the compart- ment, was pointlessly duplicated, in different lettering, at knee-height on the interior panelling. The blinds worked imperfectly, and a notice on the cold tap in the lavatory said, 'This is not drinking water,' At 10.30, just after I had gisne to sleep, an inspector woke me up and asked to see my ticket. When he withdrew something went wrong with the mechanism of the door, but we managed to get it shut in the end. Oh. well.
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