The Quiet Carriage (original opinion column extract)

I have spent eleven years as a train driver, and I can tell you exactly when a carriage goes quiet. It happens just after the doors close in the evening, when commuters finally stop talking and start scrolling. It is not peace. It is a kind of shared absence.

Transport authorities measure everything: punctuality, fare revenue, passenger numbers. Last year, our network carried more than forty million trips. Yet no one measures the number of conversations that did not happen in those carriages, or the strangers who never quite met.

I am not asking anyone to throw away their phone. I use mine to check timetables like everyone else. But I would like the network to trial one carriage per train where screens stay in pockets and people are free to read, look out the window or, heaven forbid, talk. A modest experiment costs almost nothing. If nobody uses it, we will know. If people do, we may find out something important about what we have been missing.

Last month an elderly passenger thanked me at the end of the line. She said it was the first time all week anyone had spoken to her. She had been talking, she said, to the young man in the seat beside her, whose phone had died.