Trains with two, and why we still do it

Two hours ten on the train. An hour fifty in the car, plus parking, and the train costs more.

We take the train, and I want to write down why, because on a spreadsheet it is the wrong decision.

The two hours are different

In the car, one adult is driving. The other is turned round at an angle that hurts, passing things backwards, retrieving a dropped thing from under a seat while moving at seventy.

On the train, both adults are available. You can face each other. You can walk to the end and back four times, which Rowan did, formally, as an activity. You can eat a sandwich that is not being eaten in a car park. You can read a book to somebody who is sitting next to you rather than shouting one over your shoulder.

By the time we arrive, nobody has been contained for two hours. That’s the difference and it’s worth twenty minutes and eleven pounds to us.

The table seat

Book it. Forward facing, table, and pay the reservation fee if there is one.

The table is the whole thing. It holds the snacks, the drawing, the game, the drinks that would otherwise be balanced on a knee. It gives each child a defined bit of surface, which prevents about half of the available arguments.

Forward facing because of the car sickness, which turns out to apply on trains too, though much less — I think because the view out of a train window is further away.

One bag

The specification is: one bag that one adult can carry while also carrying a child.

That is not a nice-to-have. At some point in every journey there will be exactly one adult with exactly one free hand — usually on a platform, usually during the ninety seconds a train is stopped — and every additional bag is a hand you have already spent.

In it: snacks in small portions, wipes, a spare top, water, a pad and pens, and the blue rabbit. That’s all.

Snacks as a clock

This is Tom’s idea and it is better than mine.

The snacks are not food, they’re structure. One thing every twenty-five minutes or so, produced from the bag like an event. It gives a two-hour journey a shape that a small child can feel, and it is far more effective than saying “we’re nearly there”, which is a phrase with no meaning to anybody under six.

The eleven-minute connection

We had eleven minutes to change at a large station with two children, a bag and a buggy.

We made it. I want to be clear that we made it, comfortably in the end, and that I would not do it again for any saving.

The buggy is the reason. Getting it off, folding it, getting across, and getting back on at a stop where the train pauses for ninety seconds — I did that with a two-year-old under one arm while Tom took Nell and the bag, and my heart rate was still up ten minutes later.

Thirty minutes to change now, minimum. We buy a slower journey on purpose and we sit down and eat something.

The buggy, generally

It lived in a vestibule and was apologised for eleven times.

Unless you need it at the other end, don’t. A sling, or a child who will walk, is a completely different journey. We take one now only when we’re staying somewhere that involves a lot of walking, and we accept the vestibule as a fixed cost rather than being surprised by it every time.

The tablet

I held it back for the second half, on the theory that the second half would be harder.

The second half was the easy half — everyone had eaten, we were close, there was the excitement of arriving. The hard part was minutes forty to seventy, which is the dead middle where a small child has run out of window and is not yet near anything.

It comes out in the middle now.