Ber-dum. Ber-dum-ber-dum-ber-dum. London Transport - or Transport for London, as we must now call it - offers few pleasures. Holding on to the pillar of a Routemaster bus around Hyde Park Corner, in defiance of the regulations. Pulling into Blackfriars station as the sun rises behind Tower Bridge. Slamming the door of Mark 1 rolling stock at London Bridge or Waterloo. Petty things, perhaps, but they somehow make travelling in the capital a little more bearable.
You can no longer hang off the platform of the 19 at Hyde Park Corner, and soon the Routemasters will disappear from the 38 route too. At some point in the next decade, Blackfriars station will be extended across the Thames to accommodate longer trains and shelter passengers from the rain. And today the slam of the last slam-door train echoed down the platform at Waterloo. The old carriages have been given exceptional leave to remain on other parts of the network until November. Then they, too, will have gone.
All these changes are entirely laudable and progressive. Disabled people and parents carrying pushchairs have just as much right to travel by public transport as I do. Slam-door trains are less crashworthy than modern trains, in railway parlance: in other words, when they hit another train, more people are killed or injured. And I rather enjoyed a trip to Guildford this week on the new Desiro stock introduced by South West Trains, though the legroom is never going to rival that of the Mark 1 carriages. And once someone's threatened to burn your hair off with a lighter, the constant CCTV scrutiny on modern trains and buses becomes a lot more tolerable. But there is one thing particular regret that I can't shake off. I never paid the extra and enjoyed the seclusion of the fine old first-class compartment.
