Rail links between airports and city centres: There is room for improvement

Thenirvana of passenger experience has been designed by Winkreative, the agency run by the exhaustingly impressive Tyler Brûlé

Union Pearson Express has got the trip from the airport to town totally covered

The world is getting more competitive about ground-to-air liaisons and London's are not the very best. What would a good service provide?

Well, you could start with technologically efficient ticketing so that queues ceased. Proper baggage provision and amazingly frequent services, obviously. But also the idea – ennobling and rare – that the short journey from airport to city need not be an ordeal to be stoically endured, and might even be a premium experience to be enjoyed in its own right.

I was put in mind of this by news that Toronto Pearson Airport and the city's Union station, Canada's busiest travel hubs, are to be connected by a new train service called the Union Pearson Express. Nevermind a name that's nicely redolent of the golden age of American rail, the details here include stuff that we sufferers in the Southern Region can only fantasise about.

There are new diesels by Nippon Sharyo with shiny stainless steel carriages, Like a spiffy hotel, there are "Guest Service Representatives" and every "customer touch-point has been considered in terms, they say, of both beauty and utility. Sage green and an autumnal orange reflect the lumberjack palette of the rugged Canadian outback and Union Pearson Express takes itself so seriously it's even commissioned its own font.

This nirvana of passenger experience has been designed by Winkreative, the agency (whose earlier work included the reborn Swiss airline livery) run by the exhaustingly impressive Tyler Brûlé. It's Brûlé who founded Wallpaper and then Monocle, magazines popular among the faddishly style-conscious. It's true it must be hell to be Brûlé, with his helpless addiction to what's new and rare, But on the other hand, I'd rather a man of his refined taste, exigent demands, and expensively-acquired experience be responsible for my transit system. There's nothing wrong with wanting to drink good chablis from a Riedel goblet on an airport train. If only he promised not to talk to me, I'd be happy for Tyler to take executive control of all my travel arrangements.

Of course, it's strange that this experiment in doing something ordinary extraordinarily is happening in Canada; a nation, Brûlé aside, notoriously lacking in style. It was Canada's greatest writer, Mordecai Richler, who passed on to me, via his son, Noah, the best of the very many disrespectful Canadian jokes. Richler says the country's name comes from a despairing note written in Spanish on top of an early map drawn by the conquistadores. It said, referring to the snowy wastes from the perspective of balmy California: "acqui esta nada" or "here there is nothing," which, in the Richler version got conflated into Ca-na-da.

But that's as unfair as it is funny. I'd like to think Brûlé can really spread his taste all over the Union Pearson Express trains. I'd have no complaints about fresh, conditioned air, ergonomic seating, lack of crowding, civil staff, excellent food and drinks served with hot towels. Forget "nada". This may be the thing. On to Toronto pronto, Tonto, as the man said.