Fascinating - the way that something which we used to regard as an everyday, cheap and easy thing to do, travelling from one part of the UK to another - is now either a luxury, or only to be done if it's a necessity of work. As a student or a young man starting work back in the 70s, I thought nothing of hopping on a train to visit friends a couple of hundred miles away. Didn't have to book a year in advance to get a decent price, or risk standing all the way either.
Privatisation of the railways (after the stealth NHS privatisation which has been going on for a few years now) must be the most absurdly, grotesquely unsuccessful privatisation ever.
I thought Portillo's TV series on Great British Railway Journeys was a particularly brazen piece of pissing on the citizens, seeing as he was the very man who came up with the mechanism which pushed those journeys into the world of the rich man's pastime.
Sorry - now go back to discussing the meat.
EDITED: 13 Jul 2012 13:19 by WILLIAMA