Text 1: Standing room only, again, by Hannah Loxley

An original contemporary newspaper opinion column.

Every weekday I pay twenty-three pounds to stand in someone else’s armpit for forty minutes. My annual season ticket into the city costs more than five thousand pounds, and in two years I have had a seat in the morning perhaps a dozen times.

The 7.42 is meant to have eight carriages. Three times this month it has turned up with four, which means people pressing against the doors and the guard announcing, in a voice of deep weariness, that passengers should move right down inside the train. There is nowhere to move to.

Then there are the delays. Signal failures, a shortage of drivers, leaves on the line, and once, memorably, a swan. When a train is cancelled, the next one is twice as full, and those of us on the platform at the later stations do not get on at all. My manager has stopped believing me.

The rail company’s posters show smiling passengers working on laptops at tidy tables. I would settle for being able to reach my phone. We are not asking for luxury, only for the service we have already paid for.

Text 2: The workmen’s train, by A Working Man

An original letter to a newspaper written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This letter was sent to the editor of a London newspaper in 1874 by a man who travelled to work each day on a cheap early train provided for labourers.

Sir, I beg leave to complain, on behalf of myself and some hundreds of others, of the treatment we receive upon the workmen’s train which leaves Walthamstow at a quarter past five each morning.

We are glad of the cheap fare, twopence there and back, which the Company was obliged by Parliament to grant us. But we are carried as if we were cattle. The carriages are of the oldest kind, with bare boards for seats and no lamps whatever, so that we travel in total darkness through the winter months. The windows have no glass, only wooden shutters, and when these are closed we cannot breathe and when they are open we are frozen.

Into a compartment built for ten the porters push fourteen or fifteen, and men stand all the way with their tools upon their shoulders. If we are a minute late, the train goes without us; but it is itself frequently twenty minutes late, and then it is our masters who dock our wages, not the Company.

We pay what we are asked. We ask only to be treated as passengers and not as goods. I am, Sir, your obedient servant, A Working Man.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what the writers disliked about travelling by train.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.