My British Railway Nightmare

The Trials of Trying to Buy a Ticket—Any Ticket—After 30 Years of Privatization

I was invited to give a talk at a literary festival in Wales last month. I accepted with pleasure, and, though I was advised to rent a car by the festival organizers, I resolved to get to my destination—the village of Hay-on-Wye, famous for being home to 24 bookstores—by train.

Rail, after all, is one of the great attractions of trans-Atlantic travel. You can get just about anywhere, the thinking goes, by train. North America has neglected passenger rail to such an extent that only a few corridors offer frequent and reliable service. But Europe is one of the global HQs of fully-functional passenger rail: sleeper trains, Eurostars through the Chunnel, TGVs and ICEs and Aves and Frecciarossas...an embarrassment of riches for a rail-hungry visitor from the Americas.