There’s romance in them thar rails, however late, dirty and overcrowded are the trains that clatter along them.

We love our railways, on both sides of the Atlantic and even in Australia, to judge by the trainload of verse submitted by readers of Times Online in response to our invitation to take up the pen on the subject of First Great Western, Britain’s worst performer.

Readers will recall that the present-day inheritors of Brunel’s Great Western Railway hired a poet to tour the network for four days to give readings to frustrated commuters. The company insisted that laying on fun for travellers had nothing to do with its poor punctuality record, and that it was simply part of a regular entertainment programme that had in the past encompassed bands, choirs, face-painters and balloon modellers.

Most readers preferred not to dwell on the irritations of train travel, but to uncork the rosy ink and celebrate the romance of a railway journey.

Chris Mooney-Singh wrote from Singapore on the joy of commuting to work in a big Australian city:

“I’m travelling Sydney, station
by station, starting from quiet
tennis suburbs. The sun’s honey
drips down through the foliage.”

No mistaking that for Clapham Junction on a wet Wednesday.

From New York, Annie Bien offered Interborough Transit, about a morning ride on the Subway, on which the passengers are infinitely more fascinating than the train:

“The student rises for the old man
Closing Anna Karenina, isn’t that nice”

Beth Viera extolled the scenery on a trip to Haarlem — the Netherlands, not New York — finding beauty in the endless flatlands and narrow canals.

Almost all the offerings of complaint originated, needless to say, in Britain. Ray Dent, of Nottingham, knows that the GWR was once a railway without peer:

“Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Laid the track and laid it well
Early trains they went like hell
Why it’s failed I just can’t tell.”

Brian Cushing found a new source of irritation in those endless admonitory messages station announcers use to fill in the gaps between news of late and cancelled trains. The list grows ever longer: no smoking anywhere on the station; don’t leave your luggage unattended; don’t feed the pigeons; stand behind the yellow line; and don’t rollerblade on the platforms.

He is particularly annoyed by London Bridge:

“Where lest we missed them,
speakers chime
The same announcements,
one more time.”

We are not sure what to make of a mildly surreal offering from Callan Davies, although as the work is entitled Platform Nine and Three Quarters we suspect a dark Potteresque allusion:

“Being made to wait, this brick
is solid, even when the children climb
and nobody expects magic tricks
from the arch or the train times.”

There is nothing obscure about Benjamin Lister’s account of trying to get from Acton Central to Gospel Oak, with three trains in a row cancelled:

“Nor did train number three exist
At last I twigged, I got the gist
And I went to catch Ken’s other joke:
The bus to Gospel Oak.”

Blaming the Mayor of London for the failings of Silverlink may be a little unfair, especially as, Mr Lister tells us, he got his money back.

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