Off the rails: UK’s uniquely bad trains test the will to watch football

And I shall look upon your fixed infrastructure, your rolling stock, your ludicrous ticketing, your urine-soaked toilet cubicle floors on which we lay our heads while travelling the spine of this small and ostensibly wealthy country. And I shall judge you on your infrastructure, your rolling stock and all those other things. And I shall do so harshly. Because they are, let’s face it, absolutely bloody awful.

There is a theory that the health of a society should be measured by the state of its drains. The Romans? You could drive a chariot down there. On the other hand the rail network does a pretty good job too as an anatomy of care, planning, hope and indeed the ability to make some very simple things work.

This is a spectrum that runs all the way from the Mount Fuji bullet train gliding off into its frictionless calfskin-leather future; and terminates on a rain-sodden Sunday night platform at Crewe as the words “Avanti Trains regrets to announce …” emerge from the semi-functioning PA, and a sweating man in a tracksuit asks for the fifth time if you want to buy a bag of meat.

It is always a good time to talk about trains. And this weekend is a uniquely bad time for Britain’s uniquely bad trains, for their interaction with sport, and with football in particular. To be clear this is by no means a criticism of striking train staff. These striking workers are, in the end, the saviours of the train network, not the part that is crippling it. Support them. They’re telling you what is wrong with this thing.

But the fact remains that anyone wanting to travel this weekend faces a tidal surge of accumulating horrors, even perhaps a moment of decisive crisis. There are over 150 football fixtures scheduled in England, Wales and