Fretful departed: the art of cutting it fine for trains

A sure sign of middle age, according to BBC presenter Jeremy Vine, is that you start turning up early at railway stations. As quoted in the London Times, he recalls how, when a teenager, he always caught the train just as it started to move. You can't do that now anyway, but as the years have passed, he has been taking fewer and fewer chances. By his 20s, he always made sure to be in his seat before the whistle blew. By 35, he would turn up 20 minutes early.

Now 56, he says: “I arrive while the factory in Derby is spraying the final coat of paint on the carriage.”

I know what he means, up to a point. You do plan journeys more as you get older, and you learn to allow for unknown unknowns that may interrupt the best-laid schedules. Even so, if early arrival in train stations (or airports) is a measure of maturity, I may be at risk of eternal youth.

Like many, I could blame my habit of cutting it fine on those old films where the most romantic scenes always happened on railway platforms and ended with one person reluctantly boarding as the wheels turned, while the other ran alongside.

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There's an old Kodak picture of us somewhere, prostrate on arrival, in puddles of sweat

Another bad influence was that pre-Ryanair rite of passage: the inter-rail trip.  For the group I did mine with in 1986, there were always provisional schedules (often drawn up by the female members), but these were regularly revised after last-minute misadventures (typically involving the males). And it rarely mattered much, because we were young, and life was long, and there'd be another train soon. This was August in southern Europe after all – we would probably be sitting on the floor either way.

There was one of our number, however, for whom such anarchy soon became intolerable. We didn’t know her that well anyway, so her inclusion may have been a tragic mutual misunderstanding. But she needed organisation in her life and we soon took a toll on her patience.

One day, when we had a more than usually important departure, somewhere in France, the lads needed to sprint to the station (possibly from a pub), lugging rucksacks, in sweltering temperatures.

There’s an old Kodak picture of us somewhere, prostrate on arrival, in puddles of sweat.

We were prostrate not because we missed the train – we were on time – but because we got there to find our usually punctual friend had disappeared. Then, just after the train left without us, she ambled down the platform. Either she had grown more relaxed overnight, or we were being punished.

A divorce became inevitable. She was leaving the group early anyway, to stay with a friend in Brussels or maybe Berlin – somewhere in the non-Mediterranean half of the Continent. This may have influenced our itinerary after we arrived in Genoa late one evening and couldn't find cheap accommodation near the station.

We opted for an overnight train somewhere instead. The choice was either Hamburg (cool and northern) or Rome (the opposite). We went to Rome, while our mismatched friend went the other way, early. I can’t remember if we ever saw her again.

In the decades since, I have had to sprint down platforms in New Delhi, New York, St Petersburg, and places in between I may have forgotten. Reading an old diary a while back, from the baby-rearing years, I saw a holiday entry that said something like “Wien Hautbahnhof horror”.

I couldn’t remember what this had involved, nor could my wife. But the best guess is that we boarded a train at the last second, in a cold sweat, nearly leaving the buggy on the platform, and then discovered that our numbered seats were in the next carriage, inaccessible from this one, during which discovery the baby threw up on someone’s shoes. That’s just a guess, but it’s the sort of thing that happened.

I haven’t actually missed many trains in recent years, it’s true, so maybe the Vine effect is setting in. Yet as recently as last month, I had to travel from Bologna to Bergamo, for a flight home, and turned what should have been a simple trip into a saga.

Lingering too long in Bologna, while more direct services got booked out, I found myself having to take a three-train roundabout route. The connections were tight and so, increasingly, were my stomach muscles when the first was late, the second later, and the third gone. But I must have built in enough leeway despite myself because I still made the airport in time. In fact, after a mere jog through departures, I was early enough to join the back of a Ryanair queue, which as a lifelong cutter of things fine, I always consider a mark of failure.