Modern Railways

Originally, of course, it was called Trains illustrated but unification between the traditional steam era and the new diesel-electric age led to rebranding and an updated magazine title - Modern railways.

Is there a tortuous parallel to be drawn here, with unification between the steam-driven traditions of the library era and the electric dreams of the information age?  Or is there an opportunity to wallow in the cosy glow of nostalgia, remembering myself as a small boy half a century ago jotting down numbers on windswept platforms and later transferring them to neat underlinings in the listing book published (annually I think) by Ian Allan?  Yes folks I confess - in the days before they invented teenagers I was (for a time) a train spotter.  It's OK though, I'm in recovery now and I haven't touched an Ian Allan publication for years - although I just had a few moments of nostalgia trawling their website at http://www.ianallanpublishing.com/.

I still like trains (just as well, given my daily commute) so I was pretty excited when the opening of the new St Pancras International railhead gave me the idea of taking the train for last week's trip to The Hague - and a remarkably cheap deal on the ticket meant the journey would cost no more than my usual carbon-consuming short-haul hop to Schiphol.

Mind you, there's not much to report.  Check-in was painless and you carry your luggage with you just like on any other train.  I was in Brussels in less time that it would have taken me to leave Heathrow but it's not about the speed; it's about the experience.  Not the Eurostar experience (which is perfectly pleasant but rather bland, although the buffet car does produce a decent cup of coffee and a reasonably good poached salmon salad - why can't our train companies do this?) but the onward-journey experience on ordinary European trains.  I never did the Europass rail thing in my youth (I had a tendency to look west to America rather than east to Europe but I've recovered from that as well as from trainspotting as I've become a grown-up) so I took a real delight in trundling from Brussels Midi to Dean Haag HS on a rather down-at-heel semi-fast train operated, I think, by Belgian Railways.

Trains are great for solo travel.  You can work on them, read on them, daydream on them, even have conversations with strangers on them - although that seems easier in Belgium and the Netherlands than it does here in lets-all-avoid-eye-contact England.  And there's a real feeling of going on a journey - of travelling - which somehow doesn't happen when you're in a tin tube at 35,000 feet watching a movie you would otherwise never have bothered to see.

Yes, I like trains.  On my train journey back from The Hague I wrote an article for Update on the meeting I had with Margaret Hodge and our work on professionalism in public libraries - look out for that in the New Year.

On a train you've got the space and time to let your thoughts play around with the topic under consideration in a way, which is not always possible in our hustle-bustle world.  If air travel of the mind is like the purposive information user carrying out a structured search in order to reach a particular pre-ordained knowledge destination - then train travel of the mind is like browsing: wandering through the bookshelves of the consciousness making serendipitous connections ....

I wrote this blogpiece on my train journey into work this morning.  You can probably tell.