The last train out of the city leaves at eight minutes to midnight, and on most nights it carries fewer people than it has doors. I have counted. On a Tuesday in October there were eleven of us across six carriages: two nurses going home from the late shift, a man with a cello case who slept from the first station, a group of students who got off together without saying goodbye, and the rest of us, each in a seat facing backwards, watching the platform lights give up one by one.
By any arithmetic the 23:52 should not exist. A bus would do the job for a tenth of the cost, and a taxi voucher for the nurses would do it for less. The operator knows this; every few years a consultant’s report says so in a table.1 The train runs anyway, and I have come to think that it runs because it is not really a train. It is a promise printed at the bottom of a timetable.
What the last line says
Read any timetable from the bottom up and it changes character. The early columns are about capacity: how many people, how often, at what speed. The last column is about something else. It tells you how late you may stay out, how far from home a conversation can wander before it has to stop. It sets the outer edge of an evening.
When a railway cuts its last train, the people who complain are rarely the people who used it. They are the people who might have. The woman who has never once missed the 23:52 still plans her dinners around the knowledge that she could. Take the train away and the dinner ends at ten, because now there is a risk, and the risk is enough.
A timetable is a list of times. Its last line is a list of permissions.
I wrote that sentence on the back of a ticket on the Tuesday in October, and I still believe it, although it reads better at midnight than in the morning.
Who it is for
The nurses are the obvious answer, and they matter. A town that wants people to work at night owes them a way home that does not depend on someone waiting up. But the cellist matters too, and so do the students, and so does whoever I am on that train: a person who stayed too long at something good. The last train is the town’s way of saying that staying too long is allowed, within reason, once.
There is a moment, a few stations out, when the driver dims the lights in the empty carriages to save power, and the train goes on through the dark with only our carriage lit, like a room that has been carried out of a house. Nobody speaks. The cellist sleeps. It is the most public place I know in which to be entirely alone.
The cost of a promise
I do not pretend this is an argument a finance committee will accept. A promise is expensive precisely because it is kept on the nights it is not needed. That is what makes it a promise and not a service.2 The day the 23:52 runs only when it is full, it will stop being the last train and become one more train that happens to be late.
So I count the passengers, and I do not tell anyone the number. Eleven is a small number. It is also exactly enough people to fill a town with the knowledge that it can get home.
Notes
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The most recent one is careful, and fair, and about forty pages long. Its recommendation is in the second paragraph; the remaining thirty-nine pages explain why nobody will follow it.
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The distinction comes from my grandmother, who said it about lighthouses, not trains. She had never seen a lighthouse; she meant her brother, who phoned every Sunday whether or not he had anything to say.
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