Travel Pain

• Quiet zones on trains:

  • Only make sense if the train company itself makes minimal noise. Waffling away on the PA, as on the Heathrow Express this morning, does not a quiet journey make.

  • Allow talking, and modern mobile phone microphones are sophisticated enough to pick up normal voice volume audibly, so why are mobiles not permitted? Shouting into the phone is a different matter. Having said that, landline phones normally feed back a small amount of your voice into the loudspeaker to encourage you to be quieter - why don’t mobiles do the same? Perhaps an audio engineer could explain.

• As I was forced to learn from Heathrow Express TV, there is a taxi-sharing scheme in place at Paddington. I would imagine that most people getting the Heathrow Express are not strapped for cash (the tube is much cheaper, and the Heathrow Express is the most expensive train in the UK by distance travelled), so is this cab penny-pinching scheme really successful?

• Heathrow is becoming increasingly unpleasant to travel through. This is my first time there since the new security restrictions, and they’d obviously driven a girl behind me in the queue to hysterical tears - she’d had to check in some prized possession. I heard her dad vow that they wouldn’t transit through Heathrow again. If BAA don’t lobby the government to get the worst of this removed, I guess they’ll soon be in real trouble.

• Because Terminal 4 is so tedious, and because the only coach I could find got me to Heathrow a painful five hours early this morning, I’m currently sitting in the paid-for Holodeck lounge. I don’t normally get lounge access (not a frequent enough traveller), but it’s pleasant enough even if I can’t get wireless working (put simply, Access Connections is getting confused again). The provided Windows PCs I’m using are set up for lock-down mode (please let me right-click, I promise I won’t break anything). Free refreshments, comfy chairs, and quiet are just about worth the somewhat pricey £18 I spent on them, though.