Sleeper Service

As is a favourite pastime of mine, I was out running while listening to Radio 4. I'm old now you see, and I don't have portable DAB. I wish I could be listening to 6 music like a cool, old, sad guy.

In any case, there was a wonderful documentary broadcast about the London Euston to Inverness and beyond Sleeper Service train. Leaving London at 915 at night, it wends its way up North, beyond such glorious places as Crewe, Preston and Carlisle. It's an expensive, rather wealthy business person past-time to be sure, which is ironic, as the accomodation must be rather cramped and spartan even for first class.

But I loved the sound of it! The comradeship, the relationship between regular travellers, the barman reporting the bar being drunk nearly dry. I love the idea of long journeys, of adventures. I'm sure that if I had my own cabin on that train, I'd nestle into my bunk and pretend to be a spaceman being out into suspended animation, and dream of stars.

I just imagine the possibilities for stories, for adventures. A murderer on the train, mutated DNA, he can crawl down the side of a speeding train into YOUR window. The train disappears on going into a tunnel, never to emerge...aliens kidnap the whole train...a tunnel floods with the train inside...one of the passsengers is a political dissident and other passengers are a secret service assasinsation squad, polonium poisonings amidst the half wine bottles and plastic glasses...women who are mermaids in disguise seinding the train to the bottom of the Firth of Forth...poison gas attack, poison fish attack...pollock spray cyanide in the carriages, halibut shoot survivors...passengers bodies rip as train food found to contain alien eggs...

All the possibilities. And the best you got was Snakes on a Plane on a Train. Pah.

I still so want to go though. And maybe the story will happen while I write it. Like the tableaux Iain M. Banks describes on the "Sleeper Service" he wrote about