About public transport in the UK (14) [Despre transportul în comun în UK]

Offering images of how British trains look like (quite comfortable, I’d say), I can only ‘illustrate’ the pictures with a little description of how Romanian trains are.

Apart from enumerating the classical epithets – old, slow, noisy, dirty (except for the sleeping cars where I had a pleasant experience this spring), expensive, always late, often crowded – I’d rather mention some anecdotical quotes.

They were offered to me by a British who had worked in Romania for some years until about a year ago, and who is quite familiar with the sad realities of our country.

Given the fact that he loves a Romanian woman, and that he is quite fond of Romania, I hope that his opinions couldn’t be considered a malicious exaggeration.

Here’s how he described to me the four categories of trains run by the Romanian state rail company (CFR) + some of my comments in square brackets.

1) Intercity – “the most expensive, and most bearable” [a bit cheaper than airplanes who are 14 -15 times faster, of course];

2) Rapid – “Oh, this one has got functional toilets” [if you’re a real expert at keeping your balance if not – God forbid! – sitting on it while the train is on the move]; 3) Accelerat –“a bit faster than very slow” [not recommendable at all];

4) Personal – “the kind of train that passes through and stops in every station where no one would like to get off” [good for an as short as possible journey, as a genuine Romanian experience].

[For all the episodes of this series, and all the posts on this blog go to/Pentru toate episoadele din această serie şi toate postările de pe acest blog mergi la: Contents/Cuprins]