This month I ticked off an item from my bucket list, by going on a steam train ride with my parents.

It was the second time this year I found myself fawning over old trains…

My dad has always been into them, an interest that never really resonated with me in my younger years. Trips up to the London Underground Met Line Station in Watford – just up the road from our family home between 1989-2011 – to see the special visit of some old steam trains – were experiences I felt I needed to politely endure rather than enjoy, whilst dad took countless photos of what all looked like the same thing.

Really, I just wanted to be at home watching grainy American teen drama series on MTV, or playing Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo with my big sister.

Roll forward about 30 years, to February 2026.

I’ve been staying with an old school friend – E – in Willesden Green following another friend’s 40th. I need to catch the Met Line back into central in order to get back to Kent, and find myself enveloped in nostalgia as we get to the Underground station.

“Look at all this old, original architecture!” I hear myself say as we enter, in a voice I don’t recognise. The dark wooden panelling around the ticket booths. The brickwork and vintage sea green tiles. All the things I wouldn’t have even blinked at as a child who used these trains a lot, suddenly becoming something of fascination and awe.

I bid goodbye to E by the ticket barriers and head down to the platform. The winter morning sunshine poking out from the white skies casts a glow over the leafy suburb that sits on the other side of the fence. I’m reminded of growing up in Watford, that confusing it’s-not-London-but-it-is-London sprawl of a place which is often maligned in jokes. A bit like Slough, maybe only slightly nicer, and with a name that doesn’t sound like a garden pest.

I reminisce seeing the tube trains pull away from Watford Met station out of my childhood bedroom window; close enough to see the passenger-shaped silhouettes through the carriage windows, far away enough to be unable to identify them. Disappointing, when you’re trying to spot your crush on their way home from the Boys’ school next to the station.

The nostalgic thoughts continue all the way to Baker Street, when something even more strange happens.

I’m actually excited to see it. Because nowadays I really appreciate and understand, that it’s the oldest station on an underground network that was the first of its kind anywhere in the world, and that’s something pretty remarkable, to be fair.

When we used to travel into London from Watford in the ’90s / early ’00s, we’d change at Baker Street to catch the Jubilee line to Bond Street, which pretty much meant Oxford Street, which pretty much meant crowds, strangers, and shops. As much as I appreciated the opportunity to go into bigger shops and buy things I couldn’t find at home, I wasn’t otherwise fond of the area, mostly because of those same crowds, and strangers.

And also because there was a wild rumour flying around at the time about somebody buying a Mars’ Topic bar at one of the dusty looking snack shops on the platform, and finding the head of a chocolate-encased rat as they bit into it. Not sure how true that is, and will never really get to find out…

…but it was all enough to taint my view of the Underground somewhat.

Until I became old (40), and suddenly Baker Street station represented a key part of our social history as opposed to nasty vermin surprises…

In February 2026, instead of thinking about the accidental digestion of rat heads, I think about how there’s a Wetherspoons next door that was once a high end dining hall affectionately known as ‘The Chiltern Court Restaurant’, a popular pit stop for those about to take a ride on the new subterranean railway in the late 19th / early 20th century.

I must visit it, because conveniently I need a coffee or five, and that refill machine is a dream in that situation. Now cleverly known as ‘The Metropolitan Bar’ in homage to the Underground’s first ever line – opened in 1863 – the space is just as familiar as it isn’t. Same old sticky tables and nachos, but surrounded by grand pillars and vintage rail posters that remind you of the role of this same set of coordinates in years gone by, when the world had yet to learn about paninis and pitchers of WooWoo.

Because it was only just about getting used to the ChooChoo.

It’s hard not to notice a beautiful – almost comforting – sense of anemoia creeping in at this point. You think about all the people that ate in this very same room decades before you, where they were going, and why they were going there? To check out potential homes in the new, leafy suburbs of Greater London perhaps, or a trip out to the countryside? How were they feeling? What were they chatting about?

It took my parents 38 years to convince me to watch Sir John Betjeman’s famous 1973 documentary ‘Metro-Land’, about the creation of the Metropolitan Line and – most crucially – the positive socio-economic impact it had. Many of the towns and villages in north-west Greater London would benefit from a quicker access to the city centre granted by the new Underground system, and grew larger and more populous as a result.

Watford was effectively part of that Metro-Land, and we had lived in it, but I never really knew what that meant. I certainly wasn’t bothered about watching a film about the likes of Harrow, Pinner and all those other suburbs we’d pass on the way into central, but as an older person, I found myself glued to the screen admiring it all. It would turn out that E had watched it once too and we had a great chat about it, but I wouldn’t imagine we’d have done so over those gossips on the landline during the evenings of 1999.

And now I find myself looking more intently at everything whenever I take the Underground, particularly on the original lines. The hidden passageways once trodden by thousands of vintage shoes, the remnants of platforms of disused stations (known colloquially as ‘ghost stations’). Echoes of the past reverberating around the very present, dozens of metres below street level.

If there are indeed ghosts on the Underground, what must they think of the passengers of today? Shuffling along at pace. Stressed. Shoving into each other. All staring at small metal oblongs and all lost them within themselves, just trying to get to their destinations as quickly as possible in a world that doesn’t seem to wait anymore.

Not because it actually doesn’t, but because we often forget that it can.

I frequently think that if there was anywhere in the world I could go – if logistics weren’t an issue – it wouldn’t be so much about a place anymore, but a time.

And a train ride would probably feature.

I turn into my parents more and more every day…