The prospect of the first trains running from Waterloo station to Paris and Brussels fills me with boyish glee, I confess. There is something about long train journeys across large continents which yields a sense of travel in the true sense of the word, an experience completely absent in the squalor of the average airport departure lounge. Having worked as a stoker of steam engines on the German Bundesbahn as a student may have something to do with my infatuation with European railways, but there is more to it than this.

Margaret Thatcher detested railways because they are communal forms of transport and impossible …