Breakfast? Follow the hi-vis jackets

The area around the two London railway terminals of King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations is a-buzz almost twenty-four hours a day with ongoing construction work for the imminent arrival of international Eurostar services. Britain’s first dedicated high speed rail line (optimistically numbered CTRL1, in case we ever get round to building another) will soon be open to passenger traffic, flying through Kent from the Channel Tunnel, skirting around the capital, past the east London site of the 2012 Olympics and into the newly refurbished and extended St. Pancras station on the northern side of the city centre. Journey times will be shorter and connections to other parts of Britain will be improved.

While all this construction work continues, a massive workforce of contractors, builders and labourers are on site building the new infrastructure. Finding myself at St. Pancras early one Sunday morning, the building site between St. Pancras and King’s Cross is already crowded with men about to start work. There isn’t really a uniform as such, but everyone is wearing a luminescent high-visibility yellow jacket and hard helmet. Originally designed to make sure workers could be seen on site by those operating heavy machinery, they’ve effectively become a cloak that symbolises inconspicuity in the city. Next time you’re in London, count the number of yellow jackets that you see in a short walk. They’re everywhere, and yet we’ve become so used to them they no longer catch our attention.

I have just arrived back in London after two weeks in Canada and America. Having already been delayed by two days, I’m eager to get on my train and go home. But being a penny pinching self-supporting traveller, I booked a cheap train ticket that is restricted to the service I specified when I reserved. Whereas I allowed for a safe cushion to get from Heathrow to St. Pancras, we actually arrived early and I’ve managed to ride the tube into London in less than an hour. With time to kill until my train leaves for Sheffield at 10h30, I need something to eat. With the redevelopment of King’s Cross and St. Pancras, the whole neighbourhood around the two stations is being gentrified. It was never a particularly savoury place to find yourself, and undoubtedly the powers of commercial development have seen that there could be good money to be made in tarting up the future arrival point for European tourists and business travellers. So standing outside King’s Cross on the corner of the Euston Road and York Way, I am already disgusted to find generic chain coffee bars popping up. After a fortnight away in the land of real diners, real fast food and real baristas, the last thing I want is a tepid over roasted Starbucks and an overpriced stale pastry. I’m British, damnit, and I want some grease in the morning…

It’s a beautiful winter’s Sunday morning, with a clear blue sky above me and a mild fresh bite to the air. It’s not yet seven thirty, and for a few moments I just stand on the corner, yearning for the ideal greasy spoon ‘caff’ to magically appear in place of the McDonald’s restaurant that has occupied a prime retail location near-by.

But then I realise that the answer is all around me. Where builders congregate, builders find greasy spoons. And I notice a small but promising stream of yellow hi-vis jackets heading east down the Pentonville Road.

I sneak off in hot (if silent) persuit. And within one hundred metres, I’ve struck gold. Adjacent to the King’s Cross Thameslink station on Pentonville Road (at number 275) is the Modern Snack Bar. A diminuitive facade opens to reveal a handful of tables with refilled bottles of tomato ketchup and laminated menus. A few very content contractors in hi-vis jackets bearing the slogan ‘CTRL’ are already tucking in. The Italian proprietor is talking animatedly with a friend, while a young waitress serves. I’m barely on the chair before I’ve decided what I’m having. For £4.75, I’ve found a proper English breakfast in the heart of King’s Cross. With a mug of hot, sweet milky tea and a groaning plate of bacon, sausage, beans, eggs and mushrooms, my first day back in Britain has been kick started.

So next time you have a hankering for some greasy English morning cuisine, you know which colour jackets you need to follow.

Slick and the six centimetre sandwich

Some of my itineraries have seen me changing trains in some slightly unexpected places. It’s all very well spending a layover of a few hours in a big city, but it’s quite often more enjoyable to discover something of a smaller town when you have time to kill between connections.

Schenectady, New York is one such place. I didn’t know of this small town until I started planning a major train trip around the USA last year. It’s the recommending connection point for passengers travelling between Montréal and Chicago. Unfortunately for anyone in the windy city who fancies a train trip to Montréal, the connection only works going west; the east bound ‘Lake Shore Limited’ misses the north bound ‘Adirondack’ by several hours. Although I suppose you could spend the night here.

This is how I first found Schenectady, in April 2006, en route from Montréal to the west coast of the USA. The full post is here.

Schenectady is a tidy little town, and a good example of the peaceful middle America I’m happy to experience for a few hours between trains. The station is small, with the tracks up on a raised embankment through the town centre, and with a small one-box station below. After leaving my bags safe in the station with the friendly attendant (definitely a good mood day for Amtrak staff) I head out to stretch my legs on a short tour of the town. Schenectady’s biggest feature is that it’s the home of General Electric, and also of Thomas Edison. Although as my USA By Rail handbook explains, that’s not how he started life.

Edison’s first job was selling sweets to railroad passengers, money from which he spent on chemistry sets and building a telegraph system out of scrap metal.

Just behind the station you’ll find the Edison Exploratorium (I think that means museum) but’s only available to visit by appointment, according to a sign in the window. I walk for an hour or two, buy some stamps from a stubborn vending machine that doesn’t like my dollar bills, and then look for a place to sit down for a while. While exploring the smaller tree lined streets on the other side of the station, I find a small saloon called Slick’s Bar and Restaurant. It’s more bar and restaurant, though Slick seems to be doing good business with his sandwiches. I’m assuming it was Slick that I saw, because his hair was indeed particularly slick.

I drank a bottle of Samuel Adams, and watched the CBS Evening News that was on a television screen behind the bar. Tonight’s top stories: the average price of gasoline across the States is now $2.86 a gallon (a bargain in the UK); the prices of building materials such as copper and plastic has increased dramatically in the last few months (apparently because of China’s economic boom… all I can say is that you should go into any Wal-Mart and you’ll see straightaway why there’s a boom in China); and also… an exclusive helmet mounted camera view of an Iraqi soldier’s duty in Iraq. I kid you not…

I am delighted to find Slick’s Restaurant again (click here for address and directions). It’s less than five minutes from Amtrak’s centrally located depot, and the small bar is a perfect place to spend some time between trains. Slick isn’t in attendance today, but a friendly waitress takes our order for two sandwiches (which have apparently made the restaurant famous). I take my time examing the unusually wide selection of bottled beers that are on sale, and settle for a not-too-distantly brewed Vermont Porter, which quickly recovers my faith in real American brewing.

This is my travelling companion’s first visit to the USA. She is slightly perterbed but not unsurprised when our sandwiches arrive. Between two thin slices of white bread are crammed dozens of freshly sliced and tightly packed wafers of meat. I chose ham and she chose beef: both sandwiches each way about as much as my Lonely Planet guidebook to the USA, and take almost as long to consume. Neither of us make it onto the second diagonal half of our sandwiches, and almost with a sense of satisfaction, our waitress offers to wrap them for us. We each mumble an acknowledgement of defeat, pay the bill, and scuttle off into the night.

Nonetheless, I look forward to my next layover in Schenectady.