Is this a first glass carriage? The fine art of boozing on the train
As a woman goes viral for downing an entire bottle of fizz, Nick Curtis explains the rules of railway drinking
This week, social media took a brief rest from horror and backbiting to celebrate an unknown woman who uncorked a magnum of pink Bollinger at 11am on a train to London and polished it off – using a crystal flute – just before arriving into Waterloo at 12.10pm, her progress admiringly tracked by Twitter user Huw Burford-taylor.
The outpouring of enthusiasm that followed for this heroic act of consumption and functioning dipsomania – with many chipping in memories of vintages sampled at odd hours on obscure rail services – speaks to a deep connection in the British psyche between trains and booze. Simply put, once you pull out of the station, all bets are off.
There is something romantic, cavalier and quixotic about drinking on a train. Someone else is driving, time is suspended, seating – if you’re lucky and on the right rail franchise – is comfortable, and beautiful scenery rolls by outside. The usual stipulations against imbibing alcohol in public are suspended when on a train, as are the parallel concerns about calories.
Drinking on a train is entirely different to the sense-deadening desperation of boozing before or during a flight: on a train, you can be Daniel Craig and Eva Green in
Casino Royale, or Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint in North by Northwest, though a quaffing companion is not strictly necessary.
On a plane, you’re just a bored, pickled sardine in a tube, even in first class. On a bus, you’re a derelict Rab C Nesbitt, and in a taxi you’re an alcoholic vulgarian. In your own automobile, of course, you’re a potentially lethal liability and a criminal. But on a train, a drink is at the very least a well-earned reward for getting through the working day, at the very best a rubicund-bubbled prelude to an adventure.
I’m old enough to remember the days of British Rail and its curly buffet-car sandwiches, when I’m pretty sure that the alcohol available in railway stations was limited to ghastly concourse pubs, and the stuff was pretty much impossible to find on board, except in luxury services that might have a dining car. In the 1990s, the profit motive of privatisation and the liberalisation of licensing laws undoubtedly added to the ease of getting squiffy on the 5.10 to Slough.
So, too, did the spread of miniature wine bottles from planes to trains (it’s not really drinking if it’s that small, is it?), and the advent of the M&S gin-in-atin. Long before Fleabag’s hot priest further popularised these potent pop-tops, a pre-mixed drink in a can had already become the acceptable way to wind down on the long commute home, or to ease one’s way into a weekend in the country.
It depends on the length of the journey, of course, as Labour’s Diane Abbott found when she was spotted one evening in 2019, necking a ready-to-drink Mojito on an Overground train through her north London constituency. It didn’t help that Abbott was then shadow home secretary, and drinking had been illegal on Transport for London services since 2008 – banned across the network by the then-london mayor, one Boris Johnson.
As with so much else in life, the acceptability of drinking on a train depends entirely on the style and spirit in which it is undertaken. On a mid-morning service to Devon last year, my wife and I walked to our seats past a couple of lads, neither older than 20, who were already working their way through a 24-can slab of Strongbow cider. Later, one of them stood behind me in the queue for the loo. “Gonna be long, mate?” he asked, with a pleasant smile. “It’s just, I think I might have to puke…”
There was nothing quantitatively different to his early morning can-fest and the woman sinking 1.5 litres of pink champagne. But the quality of the wine, and the dashing touch of the cut-glass vessel, elevates the second case from something squalid to an elegant act of self-indulgence.
The rules are fairly simple. Don’t drink on any service where you have to stand up, or on a Pendolino, where spillage is a serious risk. Don’t drink beyond your capacity: not all of us have the constitution of Bolly-woman, and you should never get to a stage of inebriation which results in you grabbing fellow commuters, the emergency cord, or your suddenly resurgent lunch. No one wants to meet Thomas the Tanked-up Engine.
Wine and pre-mixed drinks are classier than beer: that’s just a fact. Bringing your own glasses is elegant, as well as environmentally friendly; bringing your own snacks in Tupperware is naff. Unveiling a cocktail shaker, ice, mixers and a bottle of spirits is taking things to a level of pretension that runs counter to the spirit of drinking on board. It’s about relaxation, a symbolic shriving of the daily drudgery, an escape.
As the old BR slogan had it: let the train take the strain.