Reclaim the joys of peaceful train travel

Original source: The Guardian, Perth Now, York Press

Stephen Moss is encouraged that people don’t seem to be shouting into their mobiles as they once did.

It may be my imagination, but people don’t seem to be shouting into their mobiles on trains as much as they once did. Presumably, everyone’s emailing, texting and Twittering instead these days, though not me, I’m afraid: I still have an iron-age phone and a stone-age brain. The switch is encouraging, because the cacophony of a couple of years ago is subsiding, and now, with one or two reforms, we can reclaim the joys of peaceful train travel.

I am writing this on a train that is blissfully quiet, apart from one young man who is on his mobile and insisting on telling everyone else in the carriage about the flat he is attempting to buy. But the downside of the old cacophony having been silenced is that this lone bore is now omnipresent; you get to hear every detail of his intricate negotiation; and soon I am being distracted from my attempts to read the final volume of Proust.

Quiet carriages on trains only work when the rules banning mobile phone use are properly enforced.

Source: ymgerman/ Shutterstock

The long-winded droning is in some ways worse than the old days of 37 people simultaneously chattering on their phones: young women moaning about their relationships, young men planning to get legless on a Friday night, would-be movers and shakers doing loud public deals to try to impress their fellow commuters. Now, most of the young women are texting, the young men are Twittering, and the wannabe movers and shakers are signing on at the Jobcentre.

So, to make my journey perfect and allow me to get to the end of Proust’s magisterial novel, I have two small suggestions. First, put quiet carriages on all commuter trains. I presume this wasn’t done originally because, in the early days, we were all droners, shouters and shriekers. Now, like smokers, the pariahs have been reduced to a pennable, persecutable minority. And, second, on inter-city trains, forget the quiet carriages (where, in any case, the rules are not properly enforced – I was almost attacked once when I asked someone to take his personal stereo elsewhere) and let’s have quiet trains, with one or two noisy carriages where the diminishing number of droners can congregate cacophonously. Then the rest of us can sit and read in peace, or exchange the odd word with each other, and pretend it’s 1952.