sam and the city

You meet the strangest people on public transport

Good day faithful readers. One of the first things that I noticed about the trains when I first moved to London was the fact that there are no bins at the train stations, which was strange since it's a place where there are so many people just standing there eating/drinking. In Australia there are so many that even if you tried to throw your rubbish on the ground it would probably accidentally go in the bin anyway! Here you go searching for bins before you finally give up and leave your rubbish sitting somewhere for the army of cleaners.

I initially thought that it might have something to do with the recent bombings in the Tube, but apparently there haven't been any bins here for a long time. This dates back to when London was being routinely bombed by the IRA.

As much as native Londoners seem to complain about the public transport in this city, I think that it is fantastic, especially when compared with the joke that is public transport in Australia. You'd think that with 90% (or some other large percentage) of the population living in the major cities that if public transport was going to make sense anywhere, it would be in Australia! But anyway, enough complaining, back to the train system here.

To get right into the centre of London takes me on average about 40mins, or an hour if you include walking to the station. The trains run every hour from 0500 to about 2330, and every half hour during the busy periods. If you're taking the tube around central London, then you can arrive pretty much any time that you like and expect a huge wait of about 3-4 mins max to catch the train that you want. Even with this frequency, if you try and catch either type of train during rush hour you can expect to be stuffed in like sardines, which isn't much fun.

On the other hand, if you go at any other time of the day you'll most likely be able to get yourself a seat. If you catch a train into the city late at night like I did the other day you may even have a carriage to yourself. The reason that I was catching the train so late was that I was going in to meet one of my friends for dinner and I couldn't leave until I knocked off. As a result I turned up a the station still in my work clothes. When I found out that I had a carriage to myself I thought that I would take the chance to change into my normal clothes. It just so happened that just as I was pulling my pants up some other guy decided that he would like to be in my carriage too. I'm not sure what he thought that I was doing, but he quickly moved through to the next one!

I can't say that I regularly see this sort of activity going on thankfully, so I'm very happy to use the train as my main method of transport at the moment. It's a bit of a bugger if I have a large shopping load or if I need to go to the airport early in the morning, but even if I did have a car I'd still take the train into the city. I think the real test will come when I get a more regular job that pays me a bit more and gives me the weekends to do a little bit of touring.

posted by sam @ 8:52 pm