Travelling to London for work, I find that my train ticket with East Midlands Railway is “cancelled”. The female guard was quite polite about it; she caused me to fill in and sign some kind of penalty notice, and then encouraged me to appeal against it. It was only when I started to look into filling in this appeal form whilst sat in the train, that I started to encounter grave difficulties. And I got to thinking about infrastructure. Here I was, in the third decade of the 21st century, working on a modern laptop, with a modern smartphone, whilst sat on a twentieth century train trundling along at barely 100mph on twentieth century tracks.

South of Kettering, the catenary poles flash by, reminding us of the half-forgotten electrification of the Midland Mainline from London to Sheffield. That particular project has been cancelled. It has been started, and cancelled, and started again, and then cancelled again, according to some arcane and unknowable Department for Transport agenda. I’ve written about the D(a)fT elsewhere on here and noted that the Scots have a much more sensible attitude to railway electrification – that is, do as much as possible, as fast as possible. But that calculus doesn’t seem to apply to England.

The list of half-cocked railway infrastructure projects is not short. There’s the Borders Railway (part of the closed Waverley route from Edinburgh to Carlisle) which was rebuilt on the cheap with a single track; there’s the half-finished electrification of the Midland Mainline, and there is the absolute shambles of HS2, which has become a national embarrassment. Infrastructure does not seem to be a strength of the English. We seem to have forgotten how. And yet, it can be done, it has been done, it could be done. It certainly needs to be done. It is my understanding that Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was built by the contractors of the former British Airports Authority, on time, and on budget. (That it wasn’t actually opened on time is rather a different story, I think, and maybe more to do with British Airways.) So, it is possible.

But it’s not just railway infrastructure that is creaking. I’m trying to work on-line using EE’s mobile phone network. One might expect a usable (more than 5 MB/second) data signal pretty much everywhere in central England. You’ll not be getting that with EE on a Midland Main line train to London. Other providers may do better; this railway may pass through remote “black spots”. After about five or six attempts to do some basic work, I had to give up for lack of internet access. It was quite literally a waste of time. I understand very well the need for competition and a free market, but the way cellular mobile phone infrastructure is organised in the UK, does not provide best value to the customer. In some places and at some times there are overlapping competing services; at other times and in other places, there is no service at all. One buys a new mobile phone, and the sales team will tell you what colour it is, how shiny it is, how good the camera is – when all I want to know is, does it work in my front room? Does it work on the train in the heart of England?

In a few weeks I will take train with LNER, from Kings Cross to Newcastle. I will sit in a Japanese electric train which will take about 2 hrs and 45 minutes for the journey up the East Coast Mainline. Sounds great! What’s not to like? I’ll tell you what: the journey took three hours forty years ago in 1984, using the Intercity 125 – 1960’s technology diesel trains. There’s not much laudable in a modern western country about a train that takes 165 minutes to travel 245 miles, not when the French can journey from Paris to Lyon – a train trip of equivalent length – in 120-130 minutes. Although I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies: to drive from London to Newcastle will be five hours if you’re lucky. And on that note…

I used to know a fellow in East Surrey who as a boy in the 1960’s went on holiday with his family to Devon. Each year they would set out, driving along the A25, and so on through the A-roads to the A303 and on down into the West Country, taking a very long and full day in doing so. This was before the M4 was built, and long before the M25 was built.

There was a time, forty, perhaps fifty years gone by, when you might have driven from London to Derby along the M1, in not much over an hour and a half. You’d be speeding of course, but that’s neither here nor there. I have heard of someone driving from Edgware Road to Derby marketplace in 97 minutes. I myself (albeit very late at night and back in 1995) once drove from Heathrow to Derby in 105 minutes. Journey times like that would be impossible today even late at night, what with roadworks, heavy traffic, and the practical certainty of an automated speeding fine.

The road across Rannoch Moor, a road that thirty years ago you might safely drive at 90-100mph, is today literally – not metaphorically – a white-knuckle ride at 70mph. The reason is, the road is barely maintained any more and is deteriorating rapidly. In a few months time I will be driving from the Midlands to the Scottish Highlands: I expect the journey to take longer than a similar journey would have taken thirty years ago, primarily because of much heavier traffic and more roadworks. I will say nothing of “average speed cameras”.

I wonder that we in the UK have reached not “peak oil” or anything of that sort, but “peak infrastructure”. For all of my life, we have more or less assumed that there has been, and there will continue to be, improvement in transportation infrastructure. We took it for granted that roads are better, faster, and wider than they once were; that railways are more modern, with shiner, speedier trains than in the past. That has pretty much been the case for the whole of the twentieth century. Overland journeys in the UK, whether by road or by rail, became quicker, easier and more comfortable. But now, I think that has changed. In my view we can now look back at “peak travel”. I suggest that there was a moment sometime about 20-25 years ago, when transport in the UK stopped getting better, faster, and more efficient. Now it only gets worse.