Train of the day

Here is the original (1970s) rolling stock on the Brussels metro, now looking slightly dowdy. When I first lived there in the 1980s, it took me a while to get used to the phenomenal speed at which these trains accelerate away from the platform, compared with the London Underground. Incidentally the service is much better now than it was then. At the time, the interval between trains was only 20 minutes in the evening -- hopeless for a city metro -- and it was being threatened with being closed down in the evenings altogether, under the then right-wing Liberal national government. Things got a lot better with Belgium's new federal structure, when in the early 1990s the new Brussels regional asssembly took over responsibility for local transport in the capital. Devolved regional government is good for transport -- look at Scotland and Wales recently, and indeed London compared with the rest of England.