Reflections on a Train to Winchester

June 20, 2022 – There’s something special about a British railway station on a Sunday. Travelers milling about, some so obnoxiously early that their train isn’t even displayed yet, others so abhorrently late that one misstep between the gate and the platform will leave them watching their train pull off into the countryside. It attracts all kinds of people – the old and young reading the same newspapers; the former in print, the latter on their phone. Football ultras sitting alongside artists and musicians both heading to London for their own form of Sunday worship. Young families setting off on memory-making adventures and adults reuniting with anxiously waiting elderly parents near the taxi queue.

The trains themselves serve as a mobile circus of sorts. While searching for a seat, one passes group of gents, somewhere between age 17 and 70, in Arsenal jerseys chatting loudly over a cans of Old Speckled Hen at 11:16 AM; and at the table across from them, a mirror image of lads doing the same adorned with Tottenham kit. Behind them are students desperately scribbling away on paper or clacking away on a laptop in the small space they’ve been allotted; internally fuming that the footballers have taken up the coveted table space so close to exams. You soon realize your worst fear: there are no seats on your train. You will be standing in between the cars, listening to conversation between two people that is so loud, you begin to think that they want you to hear them through your AirPods on one side of you and a Londoner silently reflecting on the morning edition of the Times on the other.

In the end, it seems as if the British train is one of the last beacons of egalitarianism in the western world (if you exclude the pricks who sit in first class). People get on. People get off. Everyone suffers equally if the train is delayed and everyone if rewarded if service is on time or early. It’s a place where you can ask a strangers for sections of their paper without a look that says “why are you talking to me?” in response. Perhaps society writ large could learn something, if we all stopped and looked around at our fellow passengers at the station or on the train.

-Matt