A year ago, I took part in a race I really didn’t want to win. At 10.45am, I waved off a train from London King’s Cross station and then sprinted across the road to neighbouring St Pancras. The occasion was the first passenger departure of Lumo, the new Anglo-Scottish operator. I was racing the train to Edinburgh by rail, bus, air, taxi and rail – to see how air compared for speed.
Aboard the shiny blue express was a leading rail expert: Mark Smith, the former British Rail manager who founded the Seat61.com website devoted to international train travel. While he settled back to enjoy the scenery on the East Coast Main Line for the next four-and-a-half hours, I was on a slower, parallel journey on the East Midlands line to Luton Airport Parkway.
