Simon Jenkins writes “to get a seat on most steam trains, you must book in advance” (Opinion, 2 February) . In fact, the vast majority of our 120,000 customers per annum turn up on the day and purchase an old-fashioned Edmondson cardboard ticket from one of our booking offices, and it is the same for the vast majority of heritage railways in Britain. We do of course offer an online advance booking facility via our website, but for many heritage railway customers, going to the booking office to buy their tickets on the day is part of the experience.
Colin Chambers
Chairman and managing director, The Mid Hants Railway
• Did Simon Jenkins really compose the sentence: “A DJ knows that a vinyl groove holds a deeper bass line.”?
Jon Tye
Manchester
• Never mind the veg ban (Report, 4 February), what’s happened to tinned lychees? Drawn blanks at Morrisons, Waitrose, Asda, Aldi, M&S. Grandson desperate.
John Bailey
St Albans, Hertfordshire
• Railway modellers, having worked in scales of 7mm, 4mm, 10mm, 3.5mm, to the foot (among many others), for the best part of 100 years, tend to be well adjusted people, arithmetically dexterous, and readily combine an artistic approach with precision engineering (Letters, 4 February).
Chris Noël
Ledbury, Herefordshire
• In my youth, Weetabix were divided up by pieces of white card: I think it’s far more likely that Leslie Grinsell used these as index cards rather than the end flaps (Letters, 1 February). Margaret Drabble might know – in The Needle’s Eye (1972), a character’s mother makes “lists of expenditure laboriously drawn up … on those bits of card that separate the Weetabix”.
Sue Jenkins
Thame, Oxfordshire
• Can I just say how much I deplore the tendency to pronounce Brexit as Bregsit. Whatever next – Weetabigs?
Patrick Baker
Gloucester
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