Boats and TrainsStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

A song about leaving that never quite decides whether it wants to.

The subject

Boats and trains are the two least dramatic ways of getting away from somewhere. Neither is fast. Both involve waiting, timetables and the particular boredom of watching a place recede slowly. The song takes that pace as its own.

It is about departure without being about escape, which is a harder thing to write. The arrangement matches: it moves steadily, without urgency, and never accelerates into the release the title might promise.

The arrangement

Fifth on the album, four minutes and nineteen seconds, and one of the more overtly folk-shaped things on the record — the guitar figure is closer to a traditional idiom than most of the band’s writing, and the harmony sits in a register that would work unaccompanied.

The bass does a great deal of quiet work. Where the guitar and voice hold a steady line, the bass moves underneath them, and the song’s sense of travel comes largely from that movement.

In the sequence

It follows The Coldharbour Road and precedes We Are the Battery Human, which puts it between the album’s most placid track and its angriest. The sequencing is not accidental: the record uses its middle stretch to move from stillness to argument and back.

Live it was a regular through the band’s first era, and it is the kind of song that works in a room of any size, which is not true of everything on the album.

Travel, and the folk idiom

Songs about leaving are usually songs about speed. This one is not, and that puts it closer to the traditional repertoire than to anything in indie rock: in folk song, journeys take as long as they take, and the interest is in the waiting rather than the arrival.

The band’s relationship with that repertoire deepened considerably later. Oli Steadman’s 365 Days of Folk, begun in 2024, involved learning and recording a traditional song every day for a year and then carrying on past it.

Hearing Boats and Trains after that project is instructive. The instincts were there on the first record, well before anyone in the band was described as a folk musician.

What the reviews said at the time

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Beachcomber’s Windowsill for the Guardian on 20 May 2010, held this up as what the band do best. He called it a lovely, sympathetic portrayal of two people drawn into a staid relationship, and quoted its line about being destined to go nowhere by the fear of unrequited love.

His larger point was that Stornoway do telling details better than broad brushstrokes, and that this is a limitation — but that when the details are this good the limitation stops mattering.

He set it directly against the album’s protest song, to that song’s disadvantage.

In the sequence

On the record it follows The Coldharbour Road and leads into We Are the Battery Human. That puts it fifth of eleven, at 4:19.

No single was cut from it. The record it sits on, Beachcomber's Windowsill, carries the release detail.