Click. Then a small, tinny cough. 'Due to train failure the 23.36 has been cancelled'

Last week, as Michael Williams reported in The Independent, the last British Rail trains departed for oblivion. All rail operations are now in private hands.

Clinging to the eccentric notion that I should be able to travel without owning a car, I set off to see friends in Hertfordshire by privatised train. The words of the Transport Secretary, promising "All the signs are that we are heading towards a new golden age for the railway", led me to expect a problem-free journey.

After a jolly evening I arrived at the station in good time for the last train to London, confident that dismal experiences with British Rail - where the final departure gets cancelled, and it takes you hours to get home because BR has to organise taxis - would not be repeated.

Click. Small, tinny cough, then "Due to train failure, the 23.36 from Hertford North has been cancelled". Click.

West Anglia Great Northern, which runs (or fails to run) trains on the line, has solved the problem of passengers getting cross with station staff by removing the staff from stations. So a disembodied voice informs travellers that the last train has been cancelled.

By now it is midnight, and there has been no crackly public address suggestion about what arrangements are to be made for passengers with no way to get home.

Try this: you phone directory enquiries to find the number for the company's head office in Cambridge. There follows a disconcerting interlude where the operator asks: "Is that Cambridge in Cambridgeshire or Gloucestershire?" Having assured her it is the more celebrated of the two, you are told the number for National Rail Enquiries rather than anything for local calamities.

You ring constantly for 20 minutes, getting the engaged tone every time. Evidently the way that West Anglia Great Northern avoids that messy, expensive business of organising taxis is by making itself entirely uncontactable.

My friends were remarkably polite considering that I turned up on their doorstep again in the early hours of Sunday morning hoping for a place to sleep. And I finally arrived back at King's Cross just nine hours late. Is this a record for a 15-mile journey?

One of the better developments of British Rail shortly before it was dismembered was to introduce in-train magazines. But a line in the current edition of the handy West Coast publication 20:20 unwittingly helps the image of the decline of the railways.

The subject of the article is Preston, one of Britain's great rail towns. But you would never guess so from the story, whose most telling quote is: "At the moment Preston is a place you pass by on the motorway". Rail passengers thereby get the not-so-subliminal message that they really should be travelling by car. Maybe I should buy one after all.