ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with issues of personal politics and the train. Feminists were the first to argue that what happened in the private sphere and what happened between individuals was as important as what happened in the public sphere. For feminists, then, the personal and the private are political and of theoretical significance. A comparison of travel in different parts of Britain and across countries and cultures seems to highlight different emotional norms. Negotiating time spent with strangers in a confined public space can lead either to potential relationships, or to feelings of irritation, as Georg Simmel noted in his various discussions of the modern metropolis. Noise was a major source of tension on a train journey: loud noise, or noise of children's electronic toys, or raucous laughter, loud enough to be intrusive. There is clearly a contested acceptable level of 'everyday' noises.
