Car versus train

How much is expensive? I was wondering about this at the weekend when I filled up my car with petrol and the final amount to pay resembled a small mortgage. Petrol is now more than £5 a gallon. That really is quite eye-wateringly costly. Put differently the cost of a one year Disabled Persons Railcard wouldn’t even get most petrol gauges above halfway. I think that’s too expensive.

It’s odd how things are expensive in different contexts. For example Mrs Ramblings thinks nothing about buying a posh coffee when we’re out, costing somewhere around about £3.00, but thinks a jar of coffee is ‘expensive’. As for shoes there seems to be an entirely different logic applied to the costs of shoes between men and women. I think expensive shoes are anything more than £40, Mrs Ramblings seems to carry a figure in her head that is four or five times higher than this. Who is right?

There is an assumption by some people outside of Railcard Towers that everyone in the rail industry is anti-car. This is not true. I like cars. They just have their limitations and are incredibly expensive to run. Compared to trains there are lots of things you can’t do with a car. For example you can’t read the paper whilst driving, you can’t continue your journey and go to the loo at the same time, you can’t get engaged in conversation with a passenger you have never met before (unless you pick up hitch hikers who have disappeared anyway), and you can’t have a glass of wine whilst driving. All of these things can be done from the comfort of your rail carriage.

Now I recognise there are disadvantages – for example you have to wait for a train and you have to travel with people you’ve never met before - but for me, nothing beats a good train journey. London to Glasgow by rail is a joy, London to Glasgow by car is a nightmare. By train it takes about 4.5 hours, by car you can spend 4 hours just getting around Birmingham.

Recently Mrs Ramblings and I changed our car. A big ticket, expensive item. For years we have been driving a clapped out Peugeot 106 that was new before Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Whilst our little diesel chuga-boom was old, it was cheap to run and reliable, albeit so basic that there wasn’t really much to go wrong. It had no power steering, manual windows, no central locking and I think there was even a button on the dashboard to activate a man in front to walk with a warning flag.

I admit to being useless with mechanical things so I wanted something that was reliable and nearly as cheap to run as the Medieval Peugeot. Luckily most modern cars are so complicated that changing the spark plugs, a feat beyond me in the past, requires a degree in Applied Science and a post-graduate qualification in Applied Philosophy. So looking around car showrooms means that you just open the lid, see where the engine is and know that you will probably never need to look in there again. On the other hand car salesmen assume that all men are Clarksonesque petrol-heads who want to talk about torque and performance and actually understand what all the gibberishness means.

Luckily Mrs Ramblings has the ability to ask very stupid questions that throw a car salesman. Things like “is it easy to park?” which is really a question about the driver's own competence is it not? (I once drove a horse box, a converted post office wagon, which was easy to knock dry stone walls down with.) Anyway, after a bit the car salesmen tended to leave us on our own or talk about the range of colours it came in, often being reprimanded by Mrs Ramblings for suggesting that all women are interested in is the colour of the car. Knowing looks were exchanged between self and sales staff, but no words were uttered.

Eventually, and without really intending to, we ended up with a Toyota Prius. The car is like a space ship compared to the Peugeot, but then so is a mountain bike. It is quieter than a mountain bike too, in fact because it’s a hybrid it’s like driving a stealth bomber in the urban environment. It has a spooky electric motor that clicks on and off and makes less noise than a panting cyclist. Its only drawback is that it is not, how can I put it, quick. At a set off traffic lights the panting cyclist leaves you standing every time. Oh and there is a problem with the Sat Nav which, when I’m driving, is accompanied by a voice that sounds distinctly similar to Mrs Ramblings telling me to ‘slow down!’, ‘look out!’ or boasting that I’m getting 0.2 of a mpg less than her.

It’s also not a train and it was expensive. Some of this expense is because it is cheap to run - £10 a year for road tax, congestion charge free and complete with a deluding sense of self satisfaction that you’re helping to save the planet. Still it cost us more than 200 three year Disabled Persons Railcards to buy and because cars (unlike train tickets) depreciate, even if we just polish it for the next few years we will never recover what we spent. If you buy a three-year Railcard, on the other hand you recover the costs after about three journeys. You then go on saving money every time you use it. Of course you also lose the interest on the £48 in your bank account , which I reckon is about £1.60 over the three-year period, but this is compensated for by the savings on rail tickets.

Is £1.60 in lost bank interest expensive? It’s about 4p a month over the life of your three-year Railcard. I know we live in the age of austerity but even factoring in the £1.33 a month that your DPRC costs I reckon this is relatively cheap. Nearly as cheap as chips, except that in one local chip shop in London a portion was going for £1.40. And whilst I am here, what is the opposite idiom to ‘as cheap as chips’? Is it as expensive as Evian? As expensive as ….nope, I can’t work it out…but having thought about it maybe the right phrase is ‘as pricey as petrol’

Until next time.