Quiet Coach B was
actually quiet for the 12 minutes it was timetabled to travel from Newark
Northgate to Grantham. The racket started as soon as the doors were opened.
“This one, then. There’s seats there.” They stumbled aboard with rucksacks and
bulging carrier bags, but no suitcases. “They’re no good. They’re all reserved.
We’ll have to split up.”
“Excuse me, this is
the Quiet Coach,” someone already comfortably seated prior to Grantham bravely
piped up. Reducing the pitch of their voices by about one decibel per person,
they started to fan out down the carriage. “Some up here,” claimed the pioneer,
walking the full length of the coach towards our carefully chosen, reserved and
labelled, window and aisle seats, facing the direction of travel.
“Are these taken?” she
asked, staring first at the empty reservation card holders above the two seats
opposite, then at us, before returning her glance to the seat backs in apparent
disbelief that they really were vacant. “Look, six together. You go there,” she
motioned to the rest of her party. “We’ll sit here…. Do you mind?” she
implored, turning to lean over us, her bag already half on what I had already
begun to regard as “our” table. A little reluctantly, I shuffled together the
various sections of the Saturday newspaper. It felt like she was apologising in
advance for the fact that it was no longer going to qualify for the description
of Quiet Coach B.
“I’m desperate for a
coffee,” her partner exclaimed, so drained by the process of finding six seats
within shouting distance of each other that caffeine levels had been reduced to
critical. “Mine’s white with one sugar,” came the sarcastic interjection from
the other end of the Coach Formerly Known as Quiet Coach B.
All seated at last,
out came the bottles of Buck’s Fizz. The first cork to be removed ricocheted
off the light fitments set in the ceiling above our heads and shot off down the
coach in the general direction of the most recent contributor to the conversation,
and was accompanied from our end of the carriage by the sort of muffled
laughter that naughty children employ when they have just been found out.
Thus began one of the
rowdiest trips to London
The initial excitement
subsided and we chatted our way to the capital, though perhaps with some of us
feeling a little more sheepish than others about talking at what might be described
as normal volume. It transpired that our new friends did have reserved seats in
coach B, had not realised it was nominally a quiet coach and had then found out
that some of their seats were already occupied once they had embarked.
On our return journey
the next day, the attendant broke off from wheeling the snacks trolley down the
train to reprimand a young man who had infringed the rules of Quiet Coach B by
taking a call on his mobile phone whilst still at his seat. “The ticket
collector will have a word with you, so I’m just warning you,” she offered, as
non-confrontationally as she could manage.
.
I was reminded of another instance when a railway passenger had been
attracted by the noises he had heard on a train journey sufficiently to want to
record the event. It seems we are a whole world away from Adlestrop now. Edward
Thomas’s poem is surely the most evocative of all those that described the
atmosphere of times past on the railway.
When his train stopped briefly at the now long gone country station on a
summer’s day, the sounds he was met with were very different from those
concerning us here.
“The steam hissed.
Someone cleared his throat…
And for that minute a
blackbird sang
Close by, and round
him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all
the birds
Of Oxfordshire and
Gloucestershire.”
Isn’t that just wonderful?
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