EVERYBODY seems to have trains on the brain at the moment, and it's hardly surprising.

If you're in charge of an industry that's beset by rumblings of strike action and you choose just that moment to talk about price rises, it shouldn't come as too much of a shock to find that your customers are a little unhappy.

The Government would like to persuade us away from our cars and on to public transport - trains in particular.

How can this be done? It's easy - all the Government has to do is make travelling by car no more appealing than travelling by train.

This is a subject I've touched on before, but it bears further examination.

The first thing to address is pricing. If I suddenly take it into my head to visit, say, London, I can drive myself and four other people there from Swindon and back for 20 quid's worth of fuel.

The same trip by train can cost the guts of 100 quid a head.

In order to make trains competitive with cars on this route, the Government should therefore increase the price of petrol and diesel about 25-fold.

Another unfair advantage cars have over trains is that you can generally set out in your car at the time you planned to do so.

Train companies are not obliged to provide the trains specified in their timetables so, in order to make things fair, the Government should have the right to randomly disable or remove cars on days when their owners are planning to use them.

Car drivers and their passengers can also bring nice food and drinks from home, which is yet another unfair advantage over train travel.

Car drivers should therefore be forced to eat only food bought from vendors set up for the purpose. This food should be occasionally revolting and always hideously expensive.

Let us also not forget that car users, unlike train users, have a choice about who they travel with and whether they get a seat.

In order to equalise the car and train experiences, half of all car seats should be removed and anybody planning a car journey should be randomly assigned a maniac, a bore or a person with severe personal hygiene problems and an irritating sniff, and then obliged to keep that person in the vehicle throughout the journey.

Of course, an alternative to all of these strategies would be to make our train service pleasant, efficient, reliable and fairly priced.

However, I prefer not to indulge in ridiculous fantasies.

2:21pm Wednesday 16th January 2008

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