This is the age of the train.....

Image via Wikipedia

We are going to stay with friends and must gird our loins for the journey. I don't know why people are always going on about how wonderful public transport is in France...out here, out in the sticks, there isn't any. No street lights either, but I digress. We have had to reserve our ticket yonks in advance to get something we can afford. Not being an area frequented by holidaying politicians, etc, there are not many good offers either, and there is the small problem of booking online and having to retrieve the ticket at the station - always a dicey maneouvre when short of time, fifth in the queue and the woman at the head of it wants information on train times to Marseilles for a proposed holiday in three months' time. It might take us those three months to get to the head of the queue. To avoid having to leave the car in the station car park where it will be vandalised friends have to take us to catch the local train...a mere forty minutes' drive away....at the ungodly hour ordained by French railways, SNCF, if we are to make a reasonable connection to Paris, rather than making endless changes and waiting about on passenger unfriendly platforms. I don't know what they think a terrorist might do with a bench, but they must think they'd do something, so the old benches are disappearing and you end up having to sit on a plastic bucket type of thing in the waiting area.



The train, to be fair, will be a comfortable push me pull you, well, it is after you haul yourself and suitcase up the steps into the carriage from the platform. You can feel like the daring young man on the flying trapeze as you reach backwards for the suitcase to be handed to you...the alternative being to practise tossing the caber and launching the thing ahead of you up the steps, a good recipe for a hernia, in my book. Why do the French think we invented platforms, for goodness' sake? None of this problem on a British train.



The mainline train will be a TGV, so fast that the countryside is a blur beyond the window, except when the catenaries are down or someone has left a few tons of straw bales on the line, in which case you repair to the buffet car so that the interior of the train becomes a blur instead. It has the same problem with steps, and an infuriating luggage rack just inside the vestibule, so that you can't see your luggage and get a crick in the neck from turning round every time there is some movement in the carriage in case some enterprising fellow traveller is making off with your smalls. It is comfortable, your seat is reserved and if you have forgotten to punch your ticket before getting on you will be fined by the conductor. SNCF also have a delightful wheeze if you buy a last minute ticket....they will sell you one at full price without a seat number, despite their policy that all seats must be reserved to ensure that no one stands! I have travelled down from Paris hopping from unoccupied seat to unoccupied seat as people came and left at various stations, but, having varied viewpoints, did not on this occasion get a crick in the neck watching my luggage.





Then, the horror. We will have to cross Paris. Always supposing that the trains and the busses are not on strike, which some of them inevitably will be. We were trained on the London tube with its' wonderful map and its' sensibly named lines and what will now face us is a journey in which we shall walk for miles looking for place names that mean nothing to determine that we are travelling in the right direction, have to change three times at least, so more walking miles looking for place names and then will probably get stuck in those alarming doors that clang as you leave a station. Worse, there will inevitably be an Irish band playing in our carriage...and probably in all the carriages we use.





We will eventually arrive at the Paris terminal for our friends' line, go through the ticket punching and caber tossing again, get a crick in the neck, and descend, exhausted, to be met by these kind people at the main line station. They are making the long drive to pick us up as their push me pull you won't be running by the time we arrive in their area, nor is it as good as our PMPY...it reminds me of the old British Rail poster at the station I used to use...'This is the age of the train'...under which someone had written 'Mine was one hundred and four.'


We are looking forward to seeing them..it has been a long time...but we reckon we'll need the holiday to recover from the journey as we will feel as old as the train.