james mckay dot net

Here’s something I’d like to see. The ability to purchase train tickets — especially season tickets — at a supermarket along with my weekly shopping.

Queuing at a station counter or a ticket machine is something I only normally have to do once a month or so but all the same, it’s still a complete faff at quarter past seven in the morning, especially if, like me, you’re not a morning person. Getting to the station that extra bit earlier and ending up in a queue of twenty other commuters at that time of the morning when your train is due in five minutes is just a little bit stressful.

On the other hand, I pay a regular visit to Tesco or Sainsbury’s at least once a week. When I do, I have much more leeway with my time. It’s later in the day so I’m not bleary eyed and newly out of bed. Having to stand in a queue for ten or fifteen minutes doesn’t faze me nearly so much. It would be a much more seamless fit into your average commuter’s weekly routine.

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Posted at 08:00 on 8 August 2011.
Tagged: commuting

A lot of people complain about the stress of the daily commute. Far fewer people research the different options that can make it less stressful however.

For example, travelling into London from Horsham, everyone piles onto the same train at 07:25, or at 07:29 at Littlehaven. It’s a reasonably fast train, getting you to London Victoria in only 50 minutes, but it’s probably the most overcrowded service on that route. I was once told (by a conductor on a different train to whom I once got chatting) that the Southern Railway staff refer to it among themselves as “the sardine can.”

It is possible to get a decent seat on it (i.e. a window seat at a table in one of the nicer carriages) from Horsham, but you need to know exactly where to stand on the platform, arrive in plenty of time, and exercise a streak of me-first hubris which doesn’t endear you to your fellow passengers. If you get on at Littlehaven, it’s even worse, because thanks to a short platform, you have to walk the entire length of the train, and even then it’s a bit of a lottery what kind of a seat you’ll get. On a typical day, perhaps a hundred or so people pile onto the train at Littlehaven, most of them through a single carriage at the end of the platform, which doesn’t endear them to the Southern Railway staff who are constantly nagging us to “please use all available doors.” As you can imagine, this is also a pretty high-stress exercise, and consequently I’ve generally tried to go from Horsham rather than Littlehaven, even though it’s the best part of a mile further and I have to leave the house ten minutes earlier.

Just the other week, however, I decided as an experiment to try a slightly different train, which leaves seven minutes earlier. It’s the stopping service which calls at almost every station between Horsham and Croydon, and it arrives ten minutes after the fast train, but it’s almost totally empty when it arrives at Littlehaven at 07:22, so you get the pick of the seats. The additional fifteen minutes also makes it much easier for me to get some extra sleep on the train (this makes a massive difference to my day, especially if I haven’t had too good a night’s sleep), and because it arrives in London Victoria at 08:30, it still lets me arrive at my desk by nine o’clock. All in all, it’s been such a resounding success that I’ve started making it my regular train.

And of course, this is also a win for people who take the sardine can, because it means that there’s one more seat available for them.

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Posted at 08:00 on 25 October 2010.
Tagged: commuting

This blog entry is directed at two individuals in particular. Probably neither of them read my blog though, but those of you who do should take great care not to emulate either of them.

First, to the gentleman who was at the rear of the central section of coach number eight in the 18:32 Southern train from London Victoria to Southampton Central and Bognor Regis this evening, who got off at Three Bridges.

Your favourite TV programme as a child may have been Top Cat. Your favourite TV programme as a thirty-something adult may still be Top Cat. You may think it’s cool to have the Top Cat theme tune as the ringtone on your mobile phone even though you’re in your thirties or forties. But when said mobile phone starts blaring out said ringtone at full volume in a train full of tired commuters for several minutes, it gets extremely annoying. Please, choose something less ingratiating.

Besides, what on earth were you smoking that you slept through a ringtone like that for nearly ten minutes? It must have been pretty potent.

Second, to whoever rang said gentleman no less than ten times round about 7pm this evening.

Unless your problem is genuinely important and genuinely urgent, ringing someone’s phone repeatedly when they don’t answer the first couple of times is rude. They may not be in a position to answer, and by calling them over and over and over and over again for several minutes, you are sending out a signal that you are a demanding, obnoxious type with no respect whatsoever for other people’s personal space. Just leave a message, and if they agree that it’s important, they’ll get back to you. Besides, you could be inflicting the theme tune to Top Cat on a train carriage full of tired commuters on their way home, because the person you’re calling is too non compos mentis to answer.

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Posted at 20:56 on 23 June 2010.
Tagged: commuting

There is a sneaky back entrance to London Victoria station that I’ve taken to using. It’s near the end of Platform One, and it takes you out onto the corner of Hudson’s Place and Bridge Place. It avoids all the crowds outside the main entrance to the station and on Victoria Street, and because it’s much quieter, you also avoid those really annoying characters spamming you with the London Lite and other similar vacuous drivel wherever you turn on the way back in the evenings.

Obviously you still have to negotiate the crowds inside the station, but once you’re out, the twenty minute walk to Millbank up Vauxhall Bridge Road, Francis Street, Greencoat Place, Greycoat Place and Great Peter Street is about as pleasant and stress free as you can possibly get in central London during the rush hour.

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Posted at 08:00 on 22 July 2009.
Tagged: commuting

My daily commute consists of a fifteen minute bike ride to Horsham station, fifty-five minutes on the train into London, and a twenty minute walk from London Victoria to the place where I spend most of my day staring at a computer screen before repeating the process in reverse. When you’re spending a little over three hours a day getting from A to B and back again, it’s essential to have a suitable means of humping your assorted bits and pieces around, so before I embarked on this particular adventure, I paid a visit to Millets in Horsham town centre and bought myself a rucksack that I thought would fit the bill perfectly.

At the time I thought the rear airflow system of the Berghaus Freeflow 20 rucksack was a bit of a killer feature. My old rucksack (which was ten years old and falling to bits) had been giving me a sweaty back on my bike all summer, and I figured that since my daily quota of exercise was just about to double, anything to reduce that effect would be more than welcome.

Unfortunately, this comes at a price. The struts that hold it away from your back seriously reduce the amount of space that you have at your disposal. Most of the time it isn’t too bad, but sometimes it seems very inflexible somehow. There are occasions when I want to be able to take a couple of books with me as well as a change of clothes for the journey home if the weather deems it necessary to do so, or maybe even just stop off for some shopping. Thanks to the way they curve away from your back, my Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard almost refused to fit into it at all. Helpful, that was not.

So last week I went and bought another new rucksack. It’s a different Berghaus model, without the rigid struts this time, which makes it much more flexible, as well as giving it a a slightly higher capacity of 25 litres instead of 20. Despite the lack of air flow between it and my back, so far it hasn’t been making me sweat like crazy, but then again, I have been getting a better diet in recent months than I was a year ago, when I was having KFC for lunch almost every other day.

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Posted at 08:00 on 7 May 2009.
Tagged: commuting

I’ve made a few observations after ten weeks of daily commuting to London.

The unpleasantries of the rush hour can be alleviated somewhat by choosing your train carefully and getting on at the right place. I always catch the 07:25 train to London Victoria at Horsham and go for the rearmost carriage, and so far I have had a 100% success rate at getting a window seat. Most of the stations between Bognor Regis and Crawley have short platforms, and consequently the front of the train is generally much more packed out than the rear. I do not recommend getting on at Littlehaven: its platform is only four coaches long, but more people get on the train there than at Horsham, and it can be a bit of a crush at times. Then you have to jostle past people through several coaches in order to get a seat.

This effect is even more pronounced on the way home in the evenings. On Thursday I made the mistake of going for one of the front four coaches, and even though I had a seat, it was not a pleasant experience. The entire Littlehaven crowd pile in to the front four coaches right from the word go, rather than spreading themselves more evenly through the train and moving forward once we get to Crawley. This means that the back of the train is definitely the place to be if you are disembarking elsewhere.

I avoid the Underground like the plague. London buses may be a bit of a lottery in terms of overcrowding — I’ve had both good and bad experiences on the 507 — but at rush hour, the Underground is guaranteed to be so packed out that it makes a Kenyan matatu look like an intergalactic void. However, as I am working just under a mile from Victoria, it is cheaper, less crowded and more healthy to walk, as well as giving you a good bit more elbow room at only minimal cost in terms of time.

Finally, the best place to sit in a train is near the middle of a carriage. You get a pretty smooth ride there, whereas by contrast you get jolted about quite a lot near the ends of the carriage. It’s much the same reason as why the middle of a boat is where you’re least likely to be seasick: the carriage acts a bit like a lever, so the ends tend to wiggle about a lot more. Another thing about the ends of the carriage is that they can be a lot noisier if the doors at the end get jammed open.

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Posted at 09:00 on 11 November 2008.
Tagged: commuting

I sometimes wonder why I bother wearing a cycle helmet when I take my bike in to work. As far as I’m aware they’re not a legal requirement here in the UK and personally I think that’s a Good Thing. I’ve been observing other cyclists when I go into work and back home again, and it seems that we helmet-wearers are definitely in the minority. They do make you feel safer, but I sometimes wonder if that feeling is more a palliative than anything else. They’re uncomfortable, they make your head sweat like crazy, they’re bulky and cumbersome, and they make you look a complete wuss. And if what Wikipedia says on the subject is to be believed, there is no conclusive evidence that they make the slightest bit of difference to safety in the first place.

Regardless of whether I wear a cycle helmet or not, one thing you’ll never see me wearing when I’m on my bike is lycra — that horrible figure hugging stuff that reveals the outlines of those parts of you which should really be treated with more modesty. It may be aerodynamic and all the rest of it, but personally I think it makes you look so awful that it’s embarrassing, even if you are fit and healthy. It screams that you’re one of those fitness freaks who view cycling as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end and don’t care if you end up looking a total prat in the process.

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Posted at 20:22 on 25 May 2007.
Tagged: commuting