I had to go to London for a meeting last week, and went there and back in a day by train. Edinburgh to London, city centre to city centre is about as quick as flying these days.

National Express
National Express now run the East Coast line, and when it works, it is a great service. There is even Wifi on the trains now – except the Wifi was not working going down this time, but is was OK on the way back up. Everything went to time, even down to the 6 minutes I had to change trains at Edinburgh onto the Scotrail service to Perth. 6 hours London to Perth is pretty good really.
But coming from the comfort of the National Express onto the Scotrail service to Perth was a bit of a jolt. Just two carriages long, this new service through Fife was casebook old rolling stock. The wind whistled in through the windows, the heating was not working well, and the train was filthy. Really bogging. The carpet where passengers got on and off near the door was worn flat and was brown – it looked like a herd of cattle had been through. It is supposed to be the colour of purple heather that Scotrail uses (see photo). The rubbish leftover from the last passengers was still there – sticky table with a half-eaten punnet of blueberries at mine. I was not brave enough to finish them – like communal bowls of peanuts in a pub, you really never know where other fingers have been.

scotrail interior - not brown
We rattled across the Forth bridge and through Fife, and when I say rattled, I mean it: the train shook, grumbled and clanked. And the automated signs and speech were not tallying up at all: “This is Perth” announced the automated voice brightly ……. “Change here for stations to Inverness”. The moving sign in my carriage was stubbornly stuck on ‘Dunkeld’ ……. where the train was not going.
The Scotrail staff were very cheery, as always. The lady checking tickets scribbled on mine in her biro. “Why doesn’t Scotrail give you nice ticket punching pliers?” I asked. ” Because if you punch holes in the tickets, the automatic ticket barriers can’t read them”, she replied rather sadly, “it’s just how it is”.
A scribble with a biro is ultimately rather disappointing. National Express still punch neat holes in theirs. And Perth does not have automatic barriers.
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