Travel: Simon Calder column

Before a train arrives it is deemed already to have left. Even Einstein would have problems with this

OVERBOOKED, OVERTIRED and over here: feel some sympathy for the thousands of American tourists who will arrive at Gatwick airport this morning after their overnight transatlantic flights. As if the airborne part of the trip weren't bad enough, the trickiest part of their journey is about to begin - catching the train.

Gatwick airport has excellent rail links all over the country. But since the trains were privatised, the multiplicity of options is in danger of becoming a deterrent. Passengers have to try to unravel which of the five separate companies to use for their journey, a task made harder by the propensity of at least one, Gatwick Express, to be extravagant in its advertising claims - of which more later.

Now a new technological toy has been introduced to spread yet more confusion, by making entire trains disappear. I found this out after a flight from Houston that arrived at 7am. Swift progress through customs got me to the station in 10 minutes. A quick check on the board revealed a train to Brighton at 20 past, so I queued up for a ticket. When I emerged five minutes later, the departures board was blank. A jet lag-inspired mistake, I concluded, and set off to find a timetable to see when the Brighton train was in fact leaving.

Unusually for a railway station, Gatwick does not have a timetable on the premises - you have to go back into the airport itself. When I finally tracked one down, it showed that indeed there was a 7.20 to Brighton. I rushed back to the platform just in time to see its tail-lights heading south.

The departures board rattled up the next Brighton train, half-an-hour later. At this point it is tempting to think, "Oh well, I'll go and have a cup of coffee" and return five minutes before the appointed time; but if you try this, again, the train will disappear from the board. In theory you could keep going nowhere all day long, in a kind of low-rent railway version of Groundhog Day.

How can this be? "We don't want people running all over the station," said one official, "so we take the trains off the board before they leave." Leaving aside the question of whether the passenger should at least be given the option on whether or not to run for a train, deleting departures fully five minutes ahead seems a little excessive.

"We can't do anything about it," said another station worker. "When a train passes under the bridge just north of the station, it sends a signal that takes it off the departures board." In other words, even before a train arrives it is deemed already to have left.

Even Einstein would have problems with this space-time conundrum, which is most extreme on Sundays. This is the day when all the trains have their schedules "padded". The timetable assumes that engineering work will be taking place. When there is no impediment, the trains get to Gatwick - passing under that crucial bridge - five or 10 minutes early. So the Brighton train sits at the platform, empty, while passengers scurry around trying to find what has happened to it.

Luckily for most of the train operating companies, they earn the government subsidy whether or not they reveal the existence of trains to potential passengers.

IT WAS one rail company with no subsidy - Gatwick Express - that prompted this column's search for the most imaginative claim in travel. The train operator boasts that it is the fastest way between the airport and the capital, even though a rival is 15 per cent quicker. The claim was accompanied by four Club Class return tickets, which the travel desk here cannot accept since it would infringe our strict no-freebies policy. So the tickets became a prize for the reader nominating the most outlandish claim in travel.

Runner-up is an assertion for which absolutely no substantiation is made. Katy Cawkwell, of Norfolk, nominates "the overhead sign that welcomes visitors to Otavalo, Ecuador - a dirty, poor, depressing town (aside from the tourist-ridden weekly market) - and describes the place as a `Paradise of Dreams'. "Beneath it, tiny children clutch at you for sweets, and the dust coats your clothes".

Steaming into the lead , though, is the Danish Tourist Board's promotion of the Faroe Islands. The glossy 1998 brochure assures readers that "the Faroes consist of 18 main islands and several smaller ones... in summer the sun doesn't set for three months... Smyril Line sails from Aberdeen". But Geoff Perry of London sends in a non-glossy Letter of Errata attached to the brochure, which rather backpedals on these various claims.

You learn from it that the alleged boat from Aberdeen is in fact the familiar P&O ferry to Shetland, where you have to change to a Smyril Line vessel. The "several smaller" islands have vanished; there are actually only 18 in all. And, confesses the Tourist Board, "whilst the days are very long and nights are very short on the Faroe Islands, it is incorrect to say that the sun doesn't set for three months". If it were true, points out Mr Perry, Shetland would enjoy similar illumination.

Mr Perry wins return tickets for four on the Gatwick Express, during which he may be overtaken by the rival Thameslink train - though, if the Gatwick departures board has anything to do with it, there won't be many people on board.