Being up front
It’s a rare event these days to be hauled in everyday service by a locomotive – that seems increasingly to be the province of the charter special business – and the likelihood is that a current journey will be in a fixed formation multiple unit train of one species or another. I tried an ‘Azuma’ for the first time last autumn on a short sprint between Doncaster and York; swift it certainly was, but while the seats in standard class seem to offer decent leg room at last, I couldn’t say that the cushions had returned to a still hoped-for