... she's such a perplexing mixture of old New England and modernity, of a fatalism, and an aliveness that fairly vibrates.

John Betjeman would later recall that the railway 'smelt of feet', and the carriages may have continued to smell of feet after they were taken out of service in the 1920s because some of them found use as changing rooms beside the playing fields of southern England.

This has evidently been encouraging, for the current winter timetable - not even with the benefit of summer holiday traffic - shows that the two trains each way have been expanded to four.

The hour grows late and I must go home.