We’re on the Tren Maya, a 965-mile railway which encircles Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Yet if my fellow travelers seem happy enough, staring at the vines and flocks of multicolored birds, the project has become a source of deep controversy — and not simply because the Tren Maya has left a building site of swathes of wilderness. Rather, as the country gears up to host the World Cup next month, the scheme has turned into a political battleground, pitting exuberant socialist developmentalism against degrowth-orientated Indigenismo.

There are strong arguments for the Tren Maya. Cutting through hills, plains and beach resorts, it joins together the Yucatan’s main towns. Apart from being a boon for tourists — who flock for the sea at Cancún and the ancient ruins near Campeche — the tracks also traverse some of Mexico’s poorest indigenous areas. The Mexican government claims that the train has helped these communities, providing work on construction, easy commutes to resort towns, and a much-needed economic boost to campesinos in the south, many of whom might otherwise migrate to America.

These economic arguments help explain why the railway is a brainchild of the Left. The inaugural project of Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), he won power for his Left-populist, nationalist Morena Party in 2018, ending decades of neoliberal dominance at the hands of the old establishment Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). By 2018, the PRI had been in power, barring a 12-year gap, since 1929. In reaction to this long tenure, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once mockingly described the PRI’s 77-year-long rule as “the perfect dictatorship”.

Over its later period of rule, the PRI became associated with car-centric development and the privatization of public transport. To distinguish himself from Mexico’s ancien régime, AMLO staked his political success on the railway, pushing through legal objections, construction delays and concern about archeological sites by controversially drafting in the Mexican army to oversee the project and declaring the train a “national security issue”.

The president’s approach was a success, with Tren Maya completed in under five years. It’s certainly been a long-time coming. Almost all of Mexico’s passenger train lines closed in 1999 during privatization efforts by the PRI, leaving Mexicans reliant on long-haul buses and cars. Not that the vanishing of the country’s extensive railway system — over 15,000 kilometers at its height in 1964 and known as Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico — was merely a utilitarian matter of infrastructure. Trains are deeply resonant here, ghostly symbols of Mexico’s stalled progress.

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In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Mexico’s railways were employed as symbols of technocratic “progress” by dictator Porfirio Díaz. In turn, they prompted resistance from indigenous communities who often lost land to concessions, before being commandeered by rebels like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata during the revolution of 1910. Villa, especially, in the north, was famed for capturing trains, and then using them to transport rebel troops across thousands of miles of inhospitable desert.

AMLO’s Tren Maya is a reclamation, one might even say a resurrection, of this imagery. For many Mexicans, the train is not simply a moving box with windows. Rather, it aims to secure Mexico’s independence from foreign investors through heavy state involvement, while also reducing outward migration to the US. Most ambitiously of all, Tren Maya could eventually join the Yucatan Peninsula and its Gulf ports to another Morena megaproject: the Interoceanic Corridor, a land-based alternative to the Panama Canal aiming to undercut Chinese and American dominance in Latin America.

All these projects are part of Morena’s cryptic “Fourth Transformation” (4T). Essentially, 4T frames AMLO, and the recently elected president Claudia Sheinbaum, as successors to revolutionary Mexican history. Yet quietly, and somewhat awkwardly, the scheme adopts many of the development-oriented policies of Diaz the 19th-century dictator.

Notably, there are constant references in Morena-alligned media to Miguel Hidalgo, the leader of the War of Independence against Spain, as well as the 19th-century liberal hero Benito Juarez and the poncho-wearing revolutionaries of 1910. Trains are central to this self-image, with government videos of the railway racking up millions of views on X. “During the neoliberal period,” proclaims Sheinbaum, “passenger trains were privatized. With the Fourth Transformation, they have been REBORN.”

Though numbers are scarce, there are some signs that the train is helping Mexico’s poorest. During a never-ending storm, in Cinco de Febrero, a small hamlet in the southern state of Campeche, I find myself sheltering in a cow farmer’s cabin, a lean-to structure made from breezeblocks and corrugated iron. “Tren Maya has boosted ecotourism in the area,” says its owner. “This has, in turn, brought money in, improving the forest road from Cinco de Febrero into the jungle.”

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“Before, one could only traverse the road by horse with packs, now we can get around by motorbike.” The owner and his wife have a fire going. By the door, a huge Morena poster is nailed between two posts. It’s as much to keep out the rain as for propaganda, yet the couple seems happy about the train. Before it came, after all, the farmer had to spend six months a year as an itinerant laborer on far-off agave farms. Now, Guadalope says, he can “stay in the campo”, even as he can more easily take his cattle to market.

Still, other Mexicans seem unsure about Sheinbaum’s locomotive triumphalism. One family I meet is taking the train south, 460km to the rural state of Chiapas, where the grandfather, decked out in a ranchero outfit and huge cowboy hat, has family. “The train needs to be more extensive,” his American-born son says, as he leans against a wall in boardshorts and flip-flops. “There are so few roads connecting places in Yucatan. I mean, look at Mérida to Progreso,” he adds, referring to the journey from the Yucatan’s capital to a seaside town nearby. “That’s what, like one or two roads — I don’t want to drive dodging jaguars!”

My own inaugural journey on Tren Maya is from Mérida to Campeche, another state capital some 150 miles to the south. It’s not an especially auspicious start: Mérida station is a vast minimalist white cube, about a half-hour taxi journey out of town, a fact that’s already frustrating the locals. Fabiene, an accountancy student in his twenties, complains that the station’s remoteness is offputting, as is the price. Tickets are discounted for Mexican citizens and even more for locals — with short journeys only costing 1-2% of a weekly wage. Still, long-range trips between, say, Merida and Campeche can cost as much as 17% of an average weekly wage in the impoverished south. As one shopkeeper in Cinco de Febrero tells me, this is “a train for the rich”.

And if one taxi driver tells me he’s made a killing ferrying tourists from the station to Mérida’s pretty colonial center, the whole process of boarding the train, including having to show my passport, feels more like an international airport than civic infrastructure. To get there, you have to drive out past serried ranks of strip clubs, squat evangelical churches, and National Guard patrols kitted out with truck-mounted automatic machine guns. To make matters even worse, Mérida already had a station before the cube was unveiled, a 19th-century building with a handsome yellow-brick tower. Unfortunately, it closed in 1974, and remains so to this day.

Taken together, then, some here suspect that the Tren Maya is more tourist boondoggle than genuine homegrown infrastructure. And there are other worries too. “Is that worth all the deforestation?” wonders Fabiene, echoed by graffitied signs in Mérida proclaiming that “Tren Mata Jaguares” (“the train kills jaguars”). Mexican environmentalist groups, like Sélvame del Tren, have claimed that over 10 million trees have been cut down since the project began in 2020. The Mexican government has countered with a much lower number of 3.5 million. Either way, there are other worries, with activists worrying that the new tracks create barriers in the migration routes of Mexico’s jaguars.

These natural wonders are important culturally too, not least to the Yucatan’s indigenous Maya. There are some 11 million of them, scattered across Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, and they’ve not always had a placid relationship with the post-colonial Mexican state, erupting into widespread rebellion between 1847 and 1901.

To understand how this ancient culture intersects with the Tren Maya, I visit Playa del Carmen, a beach town of cheap cocktails and American tourists in Quintana Roo. There, I meet Guillermo Christy, one of the leaders of Cenotes Urbanos, an activist caving group that works to protect cenotes, natural sinkholes that are sacred in Mayan culture.

Christy drives me out from the resort town and down a remote jungle path, where we reach a chained-up gate and a military zone. We hop over the fence, looking out for soldiers, and walk several miles down a small path to a cave opening: in the distance, I can hear the Tren Maya rumbling along its tracks and military jeeps whirring past. I put on a pair of swimming boots, lent to me by Christy, shaking out hordes of angry red ants.

Then we venture into a cenote, a huge sinkhole caused by the collapse of limestone bedrock into groundwater. This particular cave, named Cenote Oppenheimer, after the father of the atom bomb, is a huge dark maw, emerging from the folds of the green jungle. Christy and I swim through a cave system until we reach a point directly under the railway — where we find huge pillars of concrete drilled through the roof of the grotto. Christy shines his head torch down and points out the huge deposits of iron and steel leaking into the pristine blue of the cave’s waters. “The government,” he says, “promised us this wouldn’t happen.”

To be fair, these worries aren’t universal. “There’s a lot of glorifying nature without caring about people in the Yucatan,” argues Etienne Von Bertrab, a long-standing expert on the train, emphasizing that groups like the Maya are “living cultures, not frozen in aspic”. And, certainly, Sheinbaum’s position is that the benefits of the train — economic improvement, fewer cars on the roads, less carbon emitted —  more than outweigh the damage caused to cenotes.

Yet there’s another issue here, too, one that arguably cuts to the heart of Moreno’s populist pretensions. According to many I speak to, the Tren Maya was pushed through essentially by government fiat, with critics of the project excluded from consultations.

That’s shadowed by some pretty blunt financial incentives. In the tiny village of Cinco de Febrero, a hamlet of concrete block dwellings deep in the jungle, the local council leader tells me that in addition to government forestry funding, the community also received an eye-watering £236,000 in state compensation for allowing the train to pass through its land.

Little wonder, then, that some radical anti-government groups are so unhappy, with one far-Left militia dismissing the train as a dangerous “pharaonic project”. Yet it’s telling, too, that even moderate Mexicans have similar critiques. “Tren Maya is a very old-fashioned way of viewing infrastructure,” says Antonio Azuela, former general attorney for the environment under the PRI between 1994 to 2000 “That trains will bring transformation. This is magical thinking.”

More than that, Azuela suggests, Morena gave management of the train to the military — exactly the kind of interference in civilian life the party is meant to abhor, and which has been a scourge of Mexican politics for generations.

Of course, most Mexicans have little time for such highfalutin arguments. In the small towns that pepper the Yucatan, life goes on much the same. Mayan communities, in many different ways, adapt around the train, just as they have to roads, telephone poles, and the internet: balancing continuity and modernity with apparent ease. Perhaps that’s just as well. Last year, after all, Sheinbaum announced that her government now plans to build another railway, spanning the 1,800 miles between Mexico City and the US border. Expect more tracks, and more debate, very soon.

In truth though, I think the old aloofness has less vanished than mutated. If we’re now reluctant to wallow in the glories of our ancient Parliament, or lambast Papists on the Continent for their garlic and their tyranny, Britain today can feel as myopic as it did 200 years ago. That’s clear enough over our mindless worship of the NHS, and our utter reluctance to countenance something better. You might say the reverse about the EU. Never mind that it ships migrants to Libyan hellholes: for a tiresome kind of British liberal, it remains a progressive Utopia.

Yet I think it’s in the railways that our modern insularity is most pronounced. For years, Britons have tolerated shockingly low standards from Glasgow Central to Exeter St Davids, even as we seem bewilderingly unaware of the vast possibilities just across the sea. But whatever we’ve grown comfortable accepting, another world is possible, one that not only makes train travel cheap and easy — but also a sheer delight. For that to happen here, it’s finally time to look beyond our islands, and embrace foreign efficiency not just in the grand principle of nationalisation, but also in engineering and food, and simply too in grasping the fundamental point of a railway.

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Labour partly won the election on a promise to renationalise the railways, all under the banner of Great British Railways. The mangled status quo of semi-privatisation is clearly no longer sustainable: compared to similar European countries, our railways underperform to an extraordinary degree. That’s clear, if nothing else, in the development of high-speed rail (HSR). Britain hasn’t added a single mile of high-speed line since November 2007, when the 67-mile dedicated link from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel opened. Since then, we’ve had five general elections and seven Prime Ministers, but not a single mile of new HSR.

It took well over a decade to approve the HS2 project, which is still almost 10 years from completion — it is finally projected to open in 2033, over a quarter of a century on from HS1. The Spanish have had HSR since the early Nineties, enjoying almost 2,500 miles in total, much of it added in the last 20 years, even as British politicians twiddled their thumbs. France, for its part, has about 1,700 miles, while Germany boasts over 1,000. Despite growing pressure from reforming groups like Britain Remade, which publicises the endless systemic barriers to getting infrastructure built, there seems to be remarkable resistance among transport planners to learning from other countries.

When John Major’s government privatised British Rail in the Nineties, it separated private ownership of the track and infrastructure from private ownership of the train-operating companies. This approach had very few precedents anywhere on earth, and, sure enough, problems quickly arose. Railtrack, the company that initially held responsibility for maintenance, collapsed after a spate of crashes around the turn of the century, ascribed to poor repair and monitoring. It was later revealed that fragmented privatisation had led to a severe loss of expertise and institutional experience right across Railtrack, as experienced British Rail engineers weren’t retained.

Nor is the curious parochialism of British railways limited merely to technical issues or a consistent failure to deliver large projects. A constant bugbear of many British rail passengers is poor punctuality, and a lack of information about delays and other problems. If you pass through large London railway stations, you will occasionally see senior rail company managers enduring a “listening” session, with passengers invited to come and ask questions or express their frustrations. While I admire the intent and the willingness of high-ups to meet the public rather than leaving harassed station staff to their fate, it’s hard to see how this is much more than cosmetic. Persistent unreliability is a problem of systems and culture, and there are other countries, other rail operators, that operate much better in this area than Britain.

That’s clear enough from the statistics. The most recent figures suggest that only about 80% of British long-distance trains arrive on time. By contrast, the Baltics, Scandinavia and the Low Countries all enjoy a rate of 90% or higher. Spain and Austria are in the same boat, and even Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU, manages 89%. Further afield, the Japanese railways are famously proud of their punctuality: delays of just a few minutes, which British passengers would barely notice, are treated as serious failures in Kyoto or Osaka. How exactly the Japanese achieve this is unclear, but it appears to be a combination of powerful cultural norms around service and excellence, and a demanding management style where individuals are rigorously held to account.

In fairness, there have been stories of fact-finding missions abroad by British rail bosses and politicians. The late John Prescott visited Japan during his time as Transport Secretary. Executives from Avanti West Coast, the firm that currently operates the West Coast Main Line and is 30% owned by Trenitalia, are said to have visited Italy for consultations, while British officials also visited the Nordic countries to discuss rail operations there.

The difficulty here is translating useful observations into concrete improvements. But that would require serious changes in mindset, attitude and working practices; it certainly can’t be claimed that technical barriers are an insurmountable problem. Consider something like wifi, with one recent report finding that Britain has among the worst onboard access on earth. Having travelled by train, I can entirely believe this. But other railways, many of them in places we might once have regarded as less prosperous or sophisticated than ourselves, provide first-class internet as a matter of course. Eastern European nations, which have only experienced real prosperity in the last two or three decades, have not had the time to become complacent about their wealth and comfort. They therefore understand the need to keep developing and innovating in infrastructure and service.

Not that all of Britain’s railway woes are technical. Long-distance rail travellers in, say, Italy, will hardly fail to notice the high quality of the food on offer. Trenitalia menus advertise “light recipes packed with flavour” and dishes created by culinary luminaries like Carlo Cracco. In practice, that encompasses everything from salads and charcuterie to beer, bubbly and fresh Illy coffee. It’s a far cry from the lukewarm sausage rolls and pre-packed sandwiches typical of British railways — but surely it shouldn’t be impossible to prepare some decent English fare in a train galley.

Other amenities are clearly better elsewhere too. Finland, for instance, provides play areas in some carriages. That’d obviously be useful in Britain, especially when childcare is so pricey. At any rate, introducing such perks here would require not so much a leap of technology as a shift in mindset, an openness to learning and developing rather than a “computer says no” assumption about how things are done.

Comparisons with other countries might also involve reflection on the kind of society that shapes the passenger experience. In a sense this is the hardest challenge of all. Culture is just so hard to prod in a positive direction; people get stuck in their ways, and find it hard to move the assumptions and perspectives which dominate beyond the station forecourt. Yet, shifting the dial isn’t impossible, if the will is there, and this is yet another arena in which British offerings can improve — especially if the newly renationalised Great British Railways can truly grasp the public’s imagination. One option is that GBR launches with explicit commitments to specific improvements, dovetailed with a public plan for how they’d be delivered. This would establish a clear expectation of accountability from the start.

Money, of course, is always a factor here. Running a railway line at a constant profit has always been tough, ever since the first routes were built 200 years ago. In the laissez-faire Victorian era, companies were forever going bust or being swallowed by larger competitors. Even now, private companies struggle without various forms of direct or indirect subsidy, partly explaining Starmer’s commitment to bring trains back under state control to start with.

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The principle behind nationalisation — that the railways are something akin to a public service, and a fundamental good even if unprofitable by the laws of the market — is clearly largely true. Yet here, again, it would be good to see Labour look across the channel as they grapple with this bewilderingly complex policy area. Though both are state-controlled, France’s SNCF and Germany’s Deutsche Bahn enjoy different structures: while the former is entirely owned by government, the latter does have some private ownership, as does Trenitalia in Italy. Japan has an almost entirely private system, but a very impressive one that requires little subsidy, not least because private firms can also develop housing and other services on the land they own. Nationalisation, in short, is not a magic bullet. Among other things, it can incentivise under-investment, something Starmer should be conscious of as Great British Railways chugs out the station.

Beyond all this, though, I think there’s one more reason to examine the neighbours: to decide what railways are actually for. A weakness of Keir Starmer’s style is that he’s focused on procedures, not outcomes, perhaps unsurprisingly for a human rights lawyer. But ultimately, it’s very hard to quantify the precise benefits of a well-functioning rail system when constrained by a spreadsheet mentality. The gains are diffuse. They show up in different domains, in different ways, at different times. To commit yourself to achieving them requires stepping away from “process brain” and thinking about the common good, unseen costs and benefits, and gradual advances in public health and social contentment. Given the way Britain’s been run for the last several decades, that’s perhaps the fog that needs lifting most.

That same year, a French mining engineer, Albert Matthieu-Favier, drew up the first more or less convincing plan for a Channel tunnel. Carriages would be drawn along an oil-lamp-lit passageway, stopping to change horses at an artificial island halfway between Calais and Dover. Imagine, though, this tunnel in the hands of Napoleon — or in Palmerston’s time, Napoleon III. Before you knew it, Boney’s crack Cuirassiers would be sabring their way through with the massed ranks of the Grand Armée marching behind.

Fears of invasion were to confound plans for a Channel tunnel for decades after Lord Palmerston’s death in office in 1865. It was, though, all smiles, champagne and jointly cut ribbons on 6 May 1994. On that day, Queen Elizabeth, a fluent French speaker, and President François Mitterand, champion of the costly and impressive French “Grands Projets” — the Louvre Pyramid, Opéra Bastille, Musée d’Orsay and the new Bibliothèque nationale de France among them  — declared the Channel Tunnel open.

Politically, technically, financially and culturally, the digging of the “Chunnel” had been a profound achievement. Britain, said the press on both sides of the crossing, was no longer an island. After a thousand years of squabbling and fighting, the glorious French and the perfidious rosbifs had sued for permanent peace with a high-speed railway line. A 25p Royal Mail stamp commissioned for the occasion, designed by George Hardie of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin album cover fame, depicted a happily stylised lion and cockerel shaking paws and claws over La Manche and its new undersea tunnel.

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The Queen, dressed in red, travelled from London to Calais on board a brand new 16,000-hp Eurostar train, packed with VIPs, cantering at a stately 80mph, while President Mitterand rode in an identical anguilliform train from Paris, scything through Picardy at 300 km/h, poppies almost in bloom. The two trains met nose-to-nose on the same platform. The Queen returned to Folkestone with President Mitterand sitting alongside in her stately Rolls-Royce Phantom VI adorned with a St George-slaying-the-dragon radiator grille mascot and shoehorned into a stainless-steel Eurotunnel car “ferry”. Madame Mitterand and the Duke of Edinburgh followed in a Citroën, a case of quel dommage or vive la difference. One says potatoes, vous dites pommes de terre.

It had been a memorable day, TV new channels that evening and newspapers the following morning indulging the story. In other news that month, Israel withdrew from Gaza, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president of South Africa, Four Weddings and a Funeral was released and John Smith, leader of the Labour party dropped dead. Away from the glare of the media, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown met for dinner at Granita, Vikki Leffman’s fashionable new Islington restaurant, to agree on which of the two would be the first New Labour premier.

New Labour were happy to inherit the privatised rail network of the Major government before them. But the same could not be said for Margaret Thatcher, who regarded it was “a privatisation too far”. As Baroness Thatcher, spruce in broad-brimmed hat and pearls, she was nevertheless also borne to Calais on the Queen’s train to see the Tunnel opened in 1994. And with fervent talk of the renationalisation of Britain’s motley railways today, it is extraordinary to think that, unlike Mitterand’s Grands Projets, the Channel Tunnel was a privately financed venture. Construction costs may have risen by 80%, from a planned £2.6 billion to £4.65 billion (in 1985 prices) before the Tunnel was complete, yet, unlike the financially incontinent HS2, it was completed successfully within just a few years.

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From the beginning, the project revelled in its cosmopolitan continentalism. Freight locomotives, ferrying container lorries fetching and carrying what is now a quarter of all physical exports to and from Britain and Europe, were named after writers and composers: Molière, Émile Zola, Jane Austen, Debussy. But the names also served as a reminder of when cross-channel travel had been a far more precarious affair. One of those class 92 freight locos, Charles Dickens, had a more morbid symbolism, a reminder of the Victorian author’s fateful journey of 9 June 1865 through Kent on the boat train from Folkestone.

Dickens, his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother, were on their way back to London from Paris. The 14-coach train departed Folkestone at 2.38pm. Half an hour later it was running at 50mph when the driver spotted danger ahead. With the locomotive thrown into reverse, speed was down to 30mph as the train approached the viaduct over the River Beault towards Staplehurst. Engineering works meant the track had been lifted. The boat train derailed, coaches tumbling into the river. Ten passengers were killed, 40 injured. Climbing out of a window, Dickens rushed to the aid of victims. He also managed to rescue the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend he had been working on before the accident. Although physically unhurt, Dickens was scarred for life.

But that catastrophe aside, there had been several ways of getting from London to Paris pre-Tunnel. It must have been fun to choose between them. The Golden Arrow, a Pullman from Victoria connecting with the Flèche d’Or at Calais. The Night Ferry and its exotic French sleeping cars rumbling through south London. The Silver Arrow — train, coach, plane and Flèche d’argent train from Le Touquet. Then, ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off) ferries from 1953, and Hovercraft car ferries between 1968 and 2000. But from 1994 and even more so from 2007 when the superbly renovated and reconfigured St Pancras station, opened by Queen Elizabeth, took over from Waterloo International, Eurostar and Eurotunnel were the most obvious and smoothest way to go. In 2009, Eurotunnel shareholders were paid their first dividend.

And unlike other costly follies of the era — the Millennium Dome for instance — the Tunnel remains a rare example of an infrastructure project that did broaden horizons for the millions of people who used it. How special it was, when passenger trains began running through the tunnel in November 1994, to ride so effortlessly and so very quickly from London to Paris or Brussels. City centre to city centre it was faster than flying, more stylish and more relaxing. True, the British side of the track was slow-going then. But with HS1, the new line that, from November 2007, allowed Eurostars to insinuate a brilliantly engineered way through north Kent at a full 186mph, the route became preternaturally fast. Such was the speed that cars and lorries heading in the same direction along parallel autoroutes appeared to be accelerating flat out in reverse gear. And for foot passengers, it could mean lunch and an afternoon meeting in Paris; London that same evening. Parfait.

The Covid panic hit the operation hard. It has since got back up to speed. Now 30 years on, it remains a symbol of what can be done, of how transport infrastructure can be a marvel. In comparison HS2 is an embarrassment. Unlike the Channel project and HS1, it fails to stir the imagination. With the cancellation of its northern route, all it can offer for £100 billion or more is the possibility at some unspecified future date of a train from somewhere in London (Euston, Old Oak Common?) on a disruptive route to Birmingham in 52 minutes rather than the existing 66 minutes.

How might we revive the spirit of 1994? What about a truly high-quality cross country railway system connected to an equally impressive Northern network? What about the linking up of “Chunnel” trains, as was originally proposed, with other British cities? A revival of the idea of Nightstar sleepers through the tunnel? Car-carrying trains speeding through the Channel Tunnel to the South of France? And, of course, as the late Queen would surely have approved, dedicated carriages for dogs to travel by Eurostar with their human companions? All cordiale suggestions welcome. Palmerston be damned. The Channel Tunnel, 30 years on, deserves to be celebrated.

Summer was when Mum and Dad worked at full tilt, flogging drinks and Ploughman’s lunches to day-trippers come to gawp at the view over the Kentish Weald. My four siblings and I provided a ready-made taskforce: washing up, mowing lawns, clearing fag ends off the lawn and, once we could pass for 18, serving drinks.

Money, or lack of it, was the main roadblock to my wanderlust. I spent most of my gap year working in Hamleys and then Covent Garden bars, amassing funds for a high summer spree. The most affordable and flexible option was purchasing an Interrail ticket: a Seventies innovation that came of age in the Eighties when some ferry services were added. It was romantic, too: you could book a sleeper train and journey while you slept. Travellers could venture as far as Turkey, or mooch around nearby France, or ride the iron horse through Scandinavia.

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So, I set about enlisting travel companions. My big sister Holly, a fashion student at Trent Poly, was a shoo-in. We then enlisted my old schoolfriend Bee, a well-travelled trainee medic who we put in charge of planning and itinerary. She suggested we all carry Dioralyte sachets, Alka-Seltzer and, she pondered thoughtfully (and, as it turned out, optimistically), “condoms”. The fourth member of our quartet was dance student Sas, who possessed the mild ennui of someone used to holidaying and necking cocktails with two older, glamorous sisters.

Halfway through the July of 1987, we four mustered at Sevenoaks station, freighted with backpacks. We divvied up the task of carrying the two-man tents and all wore sensible money belts for our passports and traveller’s cheques. Over 30 years ago you had to find a bank or bureau de change, or even an obliging hotel manager, that would issue local currency in exchange for a traveller’s cheque — the practice that dominated foreign travel from the mid-19th century until the Nineties.

We managed the Dover train and ferry crossing without mishap and headed to Paris and a sleeper train bound for Italy. Just after we crossed the border a couple of wolfish young men in leather jackets entered our couchette wielding a bottle of vodka. They swiftly identified Bee and Sas as the sirens of our quartet and rightfully focused their laser-like attention. My beloved sister and I were late developers. I was plump and plagued by zits, while Holly retained something of the ingénue.

Our lower rankings on the sex-bomb hierarchy would transpire to be a blessing. We were nearing Venice when Sas and Bee realised their money belts had been nicked by the wolves. We spent two nights camping at the Lido, but our days vanished into queuing at the British embassy, obtaining replacement passports and new cheques for our stricken travelling companions.

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Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, the mercury was rocketing as one of the worst heatwaves for decades began to hit. We headed to sweltering Rome, clambering out at Termini station where hordes of pensione touts accosted anyone with a backpack. We divvied up tasks: Holly and I went to cash a cheque, while Bee and Sas went off to find rooms. En route to the exchange, Holl and I noted a sharkish man with pock-marked skin, a grubby string vest and crafty eyes. “He looks like a pimp,” I remarked. Fifteen minutes later, we found Bee and Sas sealing a deal with Mr Brothel to stay in his “very good flat — very big, very central”, which would make us “very happy”. All we needed to do was jump in his “very big” Mercedes and we’d be there in minutes.

Needless to say, the apartment was in a grotty tower block abutting one of Rome’s busiest red-light districts. We had supper in a cafe lit by one flickering lightbulb, where the only other customers were two transexual prostitutes. When we returned to the flat, we found the pimp had bought a pile of beers and invited two male friends round. We barricaded ourselves in the bedroom. By the next morning there were six guys at the kitchen table inviting us to accompany them on a drive to a lake, where we could swim “nudo”. We elected to cut short our stay, do a lightning tour of the Sistine Chapel, then decamp to Florence.

In Firenze, a woman tout secured us two bunkbeds in one shabby room near the centre, where we photographed the spongy, yellow fungus blooming on the wall of the communal shower. Tour maven Bee ensured we ticked the key cultural boxes, but we were wilting from the relentless urban heat, so detoured to rural Tuscany where our guidebook listed a “little-visited” ruined monastery with stunning views. A bus dropped us by some stumpy olive trees, and we four mad-dog English women trudged up a steep incline for four hours in a deadly heatwave carrying huge rucksacks.

By the time we reached the ruins, half-crazed by sun, dehydration and recriminations, we promptly stripped off and posed naked in a line of stone arches as “living statues”. Inevitably, just as we’d taken up our classical poses a middle-aged couple in beige shorts strolled round the corner, before retreating in disbelief while we collapsed laughing. Later we discovered their campervan parked a short distance away. “Look, they’ve got Belgian numberplates,” said Sas. “They’re almost certainly a couple of perverts.”

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Either way, it seemed tactful to pitch our tents away from the Belgians, at the edge of a corn field. Holly and I shared one, while Bee and Sas were in the other. We’d been asleep an hour when we were woken by men’s voices just outside the tents. I sat bolt upright and watched aghast as the zip on our tent’s gauze door started to be tugged open. I could hear Bee also crying out in alarm. Holly detached a tent-pole and jabbed at the shape outside the tent, while yelling “Piss off!” The men outside laughed mockingly. We didn’t speak any Italian, but Sas used her schoolgirl French to shout that her friend was “très malade!” I discovered moments later that Bee had emptied two packs of Dioralyte into her mouth and was frothing like someone with advanced rabies.

We decided to run for it, in T-shirts, knickers and sandals, with tentpoles brandished like spears, while four burly local males tried to grab our breasts and buttocks. Feeling there would be safety in numbers, we fled downhill to the campervan, hammering on its doors with cries of “Help!” The Belgians kept their doors resolutely closed and didn’t utter a peep in response. Presumably, because they thought the nudo Anglais were the true deviants. I’ve nurtured a slight grudge against Belgians ever since. Plan B wasn’t great, but it seemed to be our only option: we edged our way very quietly into the corn field and curled up like dormice until morning.

On reflection, town life seemed safer than any rural idyll, so we set off for Siena and another giant dose of art — which was an excellent idea, until we couldn’t find any affordable lodgings. Uncertain what to do, we sat outside a café in the Piazza del Campo, trying to eke out bowls of pasta and carefully-nursed beers. It took us a while to realise that our caf, which had been almost empty when we sat down, was beginning to teem with young men who seemed to be encircling us. It also began to dawn on us that there were no other unaccompanied female tourists in the square and not a single young woman who looked local. As ever more youths arrived, it felt like we were about to incite a riot.

The waiters, noticing our predicament, started yelling at our suitors and beckoned us inside the café, then into the kitchen and out the back — where a young man was waiting with a Fiat Uno. This seemed marginally better than a public mauling, so we hopped in and were driven to a house on the fringes of Siena, where three waiters eventually joined us. We spent a wearisome night resisting blandishments and creeping hands and the ubiquitous compliment, “You have beautiful eyes.” I couldn’t help feeling Italian men would say this to any English women. An American tourist, whose parents hailed from Milan, told us later that Italian men rated British girls as “easy”, second only to Swedes.

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Nowhere else we travelled quite equalled the art, drama — or gropey menace — of Eighties Italy. Our original plan had been to head for Istanbul, but “God Help Us” headlines warned of furnace-like heat. The prospect of a two-day journey in a cramped, ill-ventilated train carriage, with reports of buckling rails, suddenly didn’t seem so enticing. Especially once we’d spent the most stifling night of our lives without aircon in Athens, as temperatures soared above 40°C. So, we jumped on an overnight ferry, slept on the deck and set off for Paxos, working our way around five islands in the end. As the month drew to a close, we made our reluctant way home via Genoa and Burgundy. We never told our parents that our 12 days in Italy had been a near-constant struggle to avoid sexual assault.

Still, we were English, and we soldiered on. The unworldly Holly and I were so entranced by the wonder of cobalt blue Greek water and cheap tavernas that nothing could ruin our memories of the trip. In recent years, with undimmed enthusiasm, we’ve taken our children to Greece so they can experience the rapture a little earlier in life than their bumpkin mothers managed.

These days, we wonder what dark misadventures our own offspring are keeping from us as the planet bakes. Then feel relieved we have no idea.

Such is the inherent safety of rail travel that Boris Johnson’s three most recent predecessors as prime minister all served their entire time in office without a single passenger being killed. Indeed, it is a tribute to recent advances in design that only one person died at Grayrigg, a very serious accident in which several carriages fell down a high embankment.

Trains are an extremely safe way to travel. Safe, environmentally friendly and, in many ways, more civilised, yet our system is still geared towards the car and rewards its use, and has been at least since the 1960s when the then Conservative government commissioned huge cuts to the rail network — the infamous Beeching Axe.

The “Axe” was seen as inevitable and forward-thinking, yet half a century later the tide of expert opinion may be shifting, and with it the serious possibility of undoing some of the cuts. It is an idea with serious merit, and growing in popularity as the problems of a car-dependent society become clearer. Only recently, former transport secretary Lord Adonis, a man who probably knows more about trains that anyone else in Britain, laid out how part of the Beeching Axe could be reversed, with a special focus on the revitalisation of regional economies.

It’s not just about the deaths, injuries and illnesses that result from car accidents, pollution and sedentary lifestyles; cars also distort urban environments and make cities and towns worse places to live, damging communities and the economy. As car numbers have increased and population density risen, the external costs of car use have increased each year.

I’m not sure anyone really likes driving. I don’t mean driving as it appears in adverts for flashy 4x4s, where a square-jawed male model speeds effortlessly through the Highlands on deserted roads in the light of a perfect sunset. I mean actually existing driving, the kind that we motorists spend most of our car miles doing; pottering along urban clearways to get to Tesco or pick up the children; stop-start progress on ring roads and one-way systems to get to work; cursing silently as we see a huge sea of brake lights ahead of us on a congested motorway.

And there is no escaping that cars are bad for us, a major source of urban air pollution, and a threat to health and wellbeing. Air pollution can seriously damage memory in later life, has been shown to worsen children’s health and is even linked to low achievement at school.

There is some evidence that the dominance of public space by cars makes children and the elderly less likely to get out and about, while Britain has some of the worst traffic congestion in Europe.

On top of the thousands killed in road accidents since 2007, hundreds of thousands have been hurt, and this is with road deaths at historic lows — between 1,700 and 1,800 per year. In 1926, when records began, there were almost 5,000 road fatalities, at a time when car ownership was still very low, and the population about two-thirds of its current level. This had increased to just over 7,000 by 1930, reaching its nadir in 1966 when 8,000 people in Britain were killed by cars, the worst peacetime year for road deaths (road deaths during the war were even higher, due to the blackout).

Since 1900, a staggering 400,000 people in Britain have been killed by motor vehicles, while total fatalities on the railways since their introduction in 1830 are are less than one per cent of that number. Even if you look at deaths per passenger mile rather than raw numbers, trains do far better than road vehicles, especially cars.

There are other, less material, issues involved. It is often said that trains are the most civilised means of transport yet devised, and it is hard to disagree. Trains can incorporate restaurants, bars and beds. You can get up and wander about. You can write. You can look out of the window and have a sense of being part of the landscape in a way that just isn’t possible on a motorway or on a plane. By comparison with, say, a six-lane motorway, train lines cause relatively minimal disruption to the environment, and are responsible for far less noise and light pollution.

But railways have often had a bad deal from policymakers, stretching back a century. For instance, competition from road freight became a serious problem for the train companies in the years after the First World War, not least because railways were legally obliged to accept all freight at unprofitable fixed prices, under what is sometimes called the “common carrier” rule.

Road haulage companies were not bound by this rule and so could cream off the most profitable work. Road freight operations also received a heavy indirect subsidy from local and national government in the form of high spending on road infrastructure and almost no taxation on roads.

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After the Second World War came nationalisation. British Rail was not itself run badly, but for much of the latter half of the century government policy heavily favoured cars. Parking was cheap or free, and roads free at the point of use, with the cost of building and maintainance exceeding the income from motoring-related tax.

Urban populations declined, cars were considered icons of freedom and success, and any interference with “motorists’ rights” was opposed with great vigour. By the 1970s around 90% of all journeys were made by car, and rail journeys had fallen to half their 1913 levels.

Dr Beeching, the industrialist whose 1963 report recommended a huge programme of closures on the British rail network, has always been a bête noire to rail romantics like me, people who regret the loss of charming branch lines and once-famous routes. But in the political-cultural context of the post-war period, the belief in the inevitable death of the dense traditional city, the mania for Le Corbusier-style “modern” urban centres dominated by wide multi-lane roads, and the seductively misleading idea that the car brought freedom — it made a sort of sense for Beeching to slash railway lines.

Of course, this conventional wisdom was wrong. The city was far from over; the worst insanities of Brutalist urbanism have passed; the car eroded freedom and quality of life in important ways. Rail did, after all, survive and thrive. Passenger journeys have more than doubled since privatisation, returning to their 1913 peak.

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Today some high-profile Beeching casualties are effectively having to be built all over again: HS2, with a price tag of around £100 billion, is in many ways a resurrection of Sir Edward Watkin’s Grand Central Main Line (the world’s first dedicated high-speed line). The planned new route between Oxford and Cambridge is a recreation of the old Varsity Line, the destruction of which is one of the most incomprehensible transport policy decisions of the post-war era.

And it is not just these high-profile lines whose closure now looks remarkably short-sighted. The loss of some smaller regional routes may have been equally foolish, given the issues facing modern Britain, one of which is the increasing concentration of high-skilled, high-status jobs in a small number of large cities and the economic falling behind of the regions.

The best hope for many mid-sized towns within commuting range of large urban centres lies in fast, reliable transport connections, but the cuts to rail infrastructure in the second half of the last century have made this more difficult.

Research suggests that areas affected by the Beeching cuts suffered permanent population decline afterwards, especially of skilled workers. The attempt to replace train routes with buses didn’t work, since road congestion and circuitous routes meant buses were slower and passengers gave up on them.

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One needn’t be a reactionary standing athwart history yelling stop to think that it may have been a mistake to close hundreds of miles of railways around Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Cardiff. It is indeed possible to maintain an extensive network of railways serving relatively small population centres in a modern developed economy; in Japan, small private railways support almost every tiny village in the country.

Partially reversing the Beeching Axe is not some romantic eccentricity, a quixotic return to a real or imagined golden age of steam trains, rural branch lines and avuncular stationmasters. There is a real, practical need to reduce road usage in general and private car use in particular, and there is a hard-headed business case for better rail links.

Excessive dependence on roads is harmful to individuals and communities, to the fabric and aesthetic appeal of our cities, and to the economy. It is increasingly hard to deny that the governments that chopped the railways chose the wrong future. Perhaps it’s time to think again.