Ten degrees of recline
You can read Solver part 3 in full (in hi-res PDF format) on my Patreon.
Part 3 begins! I’ve never been on a sleeper train. I’ve slept on trains but never for more than about half an hour. A good deep sleep it was, though. Really thickened the blood. If you want to go from Glasgow to Sheffield on a sleeper train after reading this comic – perhaps to have a Solver-themed holiday, I’ve got some bad news. You can’t.
This seems a very good beginning of a dream/flashback. Something that would help Lottie to understand who Evilottie is. Or, at least, who she may be. 10 degree is really not enough.
I hate trains, but at least a train-ride is a good place to dream you were somewhere else!
Why did this remind me of Eustace Boyce declaring himself the dream-master of all things
Once a dream master… ALWAYS A DREAM MASTER!
“Oh shut up, Boycey.”
Whonk!
That’s all I have to say about this…
My (now ex-) wife and I went on a two-week train trip down and up the US west coast for our 10th anniversary. We had a special compartment to ourselves because she’s wheelchair-bound, so there was no issue of 10-degree reclines. I slept on the top bunk and she slept on the bottom (they were too narrow for us to share).
I’ve also napped in the barely-reclining seats of the train between Seattle and Portland, though usually I stayed awake to enjoy the scenery.
My summary on the topic is: sleeping on trains is great!
I’ve taken the Amtrack from Chicago to Seattle and boy did I wish we had a sleeper car at that time. One of the roughest trips I’ve had. However a shorter trip between Seattle and Portland sounds lovely.
A lot of people do the Portland/Seattle commute on Amtrack. We live just north of the river from Portland, and I have a cousin who used to work in Seattle and spend weekends here. She had a small apartment up there and stayed with her mom on weekends. She finally just stopped storing her car up there and moved it down here so she’d have something to drive. That only lasted a couple years though.
Other people have been known to ride the train up to Seattle for a Football or Baseball game and ride the train back. Much less hassle than driving.
I did San Francisco-Seattle by sleeper one time. It had its charms (mostly the mountain bits).
It’s the Indian Pacific (Perth-Sydney) that I wouldn’t want to do in the seated section.
Just FYI, it’s Amtrak, because marketers can’t spell.
Ron Goulart explained that one in one of his novels: If you spell it wrong, it’s much easier to trademark
And it makes consumers dumber. A win-win!
I refuse to believe that Amtrak as a rail company isn’t a little bit of the Bobbinsverse version of Alan Sugar’s business empire escaping into the real world.
My wife and I took the train from Chicago to Toronto for our honeymoon. It was a 14 hour trip on effectively a commuter line, so not super comfortable, but at least it wasn’t overnight.
The Caledonian Sleeper is/was great! I used it in preference to flights whenever I could for 20 years or so where I had to do stuff in London. The seated area tho… never tried that. My first few trips I did the normal sleeper berths, but half the time you’d get assigned some weirdo in the other bunk. Which was fun except when it’s not?
Eventually I preferred to buy the cheaper advanced tickets but book out the room so I didn’t share. Then your only worry is the drunks getting on at Motherwell at 1am and the braking waking you at Watford…and the state of the breakfast.
Originally a *good* bacon roll, last couple of times I was on the bacon was half a slice on some kind of dried up artificial brioche and eventually the scrambled egg (which was pretty reliable) wasn’t that good. I just took the coffee and left.
Seeing the Caledonian Sleeper depicted in a John Allison comic is something I never expected and didn’t know would make me so happy – thank you John! I’ve done it between Edinburgh and London many times, but I’ve never had a bed, only ever the cheap seats. This is mainly as a result of frugality, I’m not claiming they’re good for sleeping. Mostly I did it in my early-mid twenties when several friends moved down to London. I loved (and still do) the fact that you can go out in town, have a few pints etc., get on the train at half 11 and be early for breakfast in London – no hanging around airports or wasting half the day travelling. The lack of quality sleep didn’t bother me so much in my 20s, but just last summer I did it again for the first time in years, now in my mid-30s, and while some of the excitement and novelty was still there, I think I might be shelling out for an actual bed next time. It really is a bargain in the seats though, if you don’t mind dealing with having a rough night of it!
Glasgow to Sheffield on the train is only about 6 hours. Barely enough to get a good nap in.
Wouldn’t you have to transfer in Manchester? So it’s an interrupted nap as well.
These posts are making me hungry
Are we hampering your creativity?
On a pure technicality, and unrelated to the plot herein, you can do Glasgow to Sheffield on a single train of the CrossCountry flavour – which sadly is not a Sleeper, but is instead a Class 220 Voyager.
Not on the Sleeper it wouldn’t be 😅
Ignoring the fact that it only goes from London to Glasgow via Watford, it doesn’t stop anywhere near Sheffield. Plus it’s overnight so you’d be stuffed getting a connection even if it did.
Upright seats in a slow train like the Sleeper (8 hours!) is a special torture. It’s nearly as bad as international air travel from Australia in economy, which is why it’s the cheapest way to get from London to Scotland – some of those seats go for under 20 quid.
(An LNER seat can go for upwards of £100 for the same trip during the day – we really ruined ourselves for trains when we Thatcher’d them)
tbf, this is all just upholding the finest tradition of British mysteries which turn upon the ephemera of railway schedules, e.g., It All Happened On the 11:20 from Hainault to Redhill, via Horsham and Reigate, Calling at Carshalton Beaches, Malmesbury, Tooting Bec and Croydon West by Mr. Neville Shunt
There used to be a London-Manchester sleeper, which was really stretching the paradigm. IIRC it left Piccadilly at about midnight and by chuntering along really really slowly, got into Euston just after 4 am. If you had an actual sleeper cabin you could check in early and lie in to 7 am (if you were able to sleep in a noisy station, without the lulling affect of a rolling train) but if you just went in the seated section it was grotesquely uncomfortable and then you were in freezing cold Euston way before the tube started running, with nothing open anywhere. They stopped running it somewhere around 1990.
For the Scotland routes in those days you could sometimes change at Crewe in the middle of the night and find a token passenger carriage attached to a travelling post office that would get you across the Pennines, so you might have been able to get to Sheffield in some awkward manner that probably meant spending the odd hour on some station benches in the small hours of the morning.
I’ve debugged so many programs in my sleep. I assume investigating doppelgängers works the same way.
I’ve slept on my share of trains, generally the Vermonter between here and D.C., but usually it’s face down on my laptop on the table-tray. The Carolinian doesn’t have enough space between the seats for that. Same size cars, two more rows of seats.
Inadequate recliner chairs; Lottie’s third greatest nemesis after SkeleLottie and gulls.
Surely, whoever’s in charge of swimming pools in the U.K. must be somewhere on the list. I wonder if the ban is still in effect.
Au contraire, Lottie is still collecting royalties on those warning signs!
There was no malice in the swimming pool escapade — Lottie saw a challenge and took it. Nothing personal.
Nothing personal on Lottie’s part. We can’t speak for all the swimming pool operators, some of whom may well have taken it personally.
She may still harbor resentment because they kicked her out before she had a chance to do Smoking.
A good start, but dream sequences can often contain surreal moments as well as what really happened…
I am certain we are about to be treated to a 100% accurate retelling with zero embellishments of the events that happened
in Lottie’s dream
I suspect that in this case the dream is simply a device the author is using to do a flashback.
There’s plenty of surreal stuff in Lottie’s life already. How can we tell if the surreal stuff in the dream isn’t actually memory?
We went as a family on the sleeper train from Hamburg to Switzerland a couple of years back which was a fun experience. A nostalgic one too, as the cars appeared to be the same as I remembered from the nineties. Supposedly they have recently replaced them with completely new models!
Being a wee highlander,you should try the full Aberdeen to Kings Cross version. The last time I did the full sleeper the train buffet car failed and I was woken by the attendant with a tepid cup of coffee and two custard creams.
WHONK have a questionable brand identity but damn if they don’t make a quality suitcase
I took so many overnight trips from Glasgow Central to London in the early 1990s for computer shows. I think they optimistically called the seats “couchettes”, but no sleep could be had. Especially that time the car was filled with Glasgow lads, high on life and Buckfast, blasting Billy Connolly and Kevin Bloody Wilson tapes from a beat-up boombox. I can still sing “Hey Santa Claus” from memory
Still, that was more fun than the time an ancient compartment carriage train broke down on Beattock Summit one winter. When the train broke down, so did the heating. We were there for hours, and it was bloody freezing
Ten degrees of recline, but six degrees of separation!