I HAVE always loved trains. From the age of five, I was taken into Leeds Central or Leeds City to catch the steam train to Scarborough or Morecambe. On a good day, you didn’t even have to go all the way into town, for the train stopped at Armley Junction, just around the corner from our house.

This was before 1963, the year of Lord Beeching’s Report which implemented the near destruction of the local rail service in Britain. Beeching was so much the industrial vandal that, towards the end of his life, he was asked by a journalist if he had any regrets.

He replied: “Yes, I wish I had been able to close the east coast line to Edinburgh.”

But years before that vandalism I was taken regularly, with my bucket and spade, by mum and dad or grandparents by rail to the seaside.

It was chuff-chuff heaven to me: that magic moment when the train would slide smoothly and silently forward, before that first chuff and first cloud of white steam, and then it would be rattling through the Yorkshire fields, as it might be past Tadcaster, York and Malton to Scarborough or via Skipton and Settle to Morecambe Bay.

I would have with me a book, or copies of The Dandy and The Beano, but I rarely looked into them, preferring to gaze out in wonder as the fields rushed by.

When you spent your days in an industrial slum, the panorama of greenery was almost as exciting as the seaside itself. I don’t think it’s only the nostalgia of age that persuades me there was innocence in those days.

For example, granddad and grandma once took me to Scarborough when it was the week of the cricket festival. One morning they left me at the ground with a shilling and instructions to mind my Ps and Qs and to meet them under the clock at 6pm. Just as they were giving me my orders for the day, a well-dressed man appeared and said: “I’m a member here. I’ll take the lad in with me.”

Wow — they’d have him for a paedophile these days. But not in 1955. He took me in to the best seats and fed me pies and dandelion and burdock all day long. Yorkshire versus Notts and Fred Trueman did the hat-trick.

But I hate the trains these days. The constant announcements, often in a voice which is both hideously loud and indecipherable.

The nannying injunction to “remember to take all your personal belongings with you”.

Worst of all, the sight and sound of all your fellow passengers — or “customers” as we are now obliged to call ourselves — peering at their electronic gadgets, uttering continuous banalities into their portable phones and otherwise living out their private lives in public.

I’m sure it’s sexist of me to suggest that it’s the smart women in their twenties and thirties who are the most adept at talking relentlessly without saying anything: “So I was, like, on my way to the shops and, like, I bumped into Gemma and I went, like, ‘O my God!’ So she was, like, ‘Where have you been all this time?’ So I was, like, telling her I’d been living in Cleckheaton since the New Year with Toby.”

I think there must be syntactical rules governing this ubiquitous form of inanity, like every sentence must contain more than seven utterances of “like” and at least one “O my God!”

Whatever happened to looking out over the fields or reading The Dandy?