travels with an unlikely aunt: trains, trains, trains.

Can I begin to tell you how much I love trains?

I love trains.

I’m not talking about the grubby ones that go underground .

I am talking about the sleek ones that sit on Platform 8 of Paddington or St. Pancras or Waterloo and purr murderously as you walk the length to find the coach where you booked your seat.

Eventually you just hop on and weave yourself from carriage to carriage, trying to walk a straight line as the train inches itself out of metropolitan-land. “ Sorry” you say as you brush someone’s shoulder with your hip. “ Sorry” you say as you slide sideways and your newspaper lands in someone’s lap.

I always book the quiet coach. Which is where people can’t talk on cell phones. And if people talk, they are asked to talk in a whisper.

When people disobey there is always the experienced traveler who will cough and then ask them nicely if they knew where they were sitting.

Just now, on the 8.45 from London Paddington to Swansea, calling at Reading, Swindon, Bristol Parkway and Neath; the conductor came through and touched the arm of the man who was reminding his secretary to change his eleven o’clock meeting, and said “ If you wouldn’t mind, sir..”

I get a cup of tea from the onboard café. They ask if you if would like fresh milk in it and totally understand when you want to take out the tea-bag before it gets too stewed. “ Enough milk in there for you? Would you like a drop more? Say when..”

I sit by the window , always facing the way the train is going. Somehow I think I will miss things if I see them after they have gone by.

I watch for cows grazing. I often say, though they can’t hear, “I don’t eat you.” I should tell them I consume vast amounts of their butter and cheese, but I want them to think well of me as I pass by. I marvel at Clouds. I look for Farms. Hills. Ancient trees. Horses. Isolated cottages. Tractors. Harvesting. I try and read the station names as we whip through and always fail. I look for bridges, Old signal houses, up on stilts, where a man would sit and switch the tracks from Caernarvon to Fishguard Harbour. I look at backs of houses; with their conservatories, washing lines, vegetable plots; their hopeful table and chairs for the 5 days of British sunny afternoons. I look for glimpses of the sea and barges on winding rivers. I spot caravans and little boxy houses and wonder who lives there. I look for the long stretches of countryside inbetween power lines and the odd chimney stack and I think, they could film a Thomas Hardy novel here.

Sitting on a train at high speed is not the same as sitting on a steam train. I can just about remember the trains where all of the carriages had individual compartments and when traveling on your own you would sit in the ‘ladies only’ compartment to avoid the unsavoury elements.

My grandfather Charles worked for the Great Western Railways. He was a conductor. Before he became an inspector with a special peaked cap.

My mother’s annual holidays as a child would be a trip on the train because free rides was the gift of his employment. And her biggest treat, she always told me, would be a custard slice from the station café on the platform before the train pulled in.

At one stage we were going to buy a house that had a train track at the bottom of the garden. “ Might be nice,” she said. “ The sound of a train. So calming.”