Railway hotels

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve stayed in a couple of newish hotels that have been converted from railway premises. The first, at St Pancras, hides behind the station’s amazing Gothic façade. The public areas are spectacular; the pokey modern bedroom was disappointing other than for its lovely, heavy leather shoehorn, used to good effect to give Emma Jane a warming bedtime whacking.

I visited the second alone – a stunning conversion of a former railway company head office building in York – yet the hotel room’s accessories were equally appealing; I wished I’d had a young lady to hand to try out the long, particularly-heavy clothes brush. (I like this trend in five-star hotels providing implements, I must confess.)

My room was in what must have been a director’s office. But who would the girls have been, knocking nervously on that heavy oak door in years gone by, knowing that punishment would await inside? Picture two smartly-dressed friends, caught evading their fares back in the 1930s. Letters had been sent to their parents offering a choice: a court appearance for theft, or a private appointment – as outlined in the railway by-laws – to be caned by the Director of Railway Compliance. Replies had been posted opting for the latter, fathers condemning their daughters to twenty strokes each, on the bare.

The friends would already have been punished severely at their respective homes, naturally, both for the fare dodging and for the very fact that they’d been on the trains in the first place. (“You told me you were going to the library; instead, you were off to Scarborough”). They’d surmise that the caning from the railway official, bent tight over his desk, couldn’t be any more painful: how wrong they’d prove to be…

…and how much I want to return to the hotel to re-enact the scene!