smoking carriages into the sidings?

i’ve never smoked in my life & given the choice i don’t normally sit in the smoking carriages but i am certain i am missing out on something..

my grandma (a smoker) used to live in Manchester and come to York to visit on the train.. it was always an exicting highlight to go to meet her.. the car trip home & usually a few hours beyond that were almost always taken up with a long and winding story of her journey; the chaos of it, the people she had met, and always a general feeling of excitement and involvement of travel..

by contrast my own train travel has almost always failed to live up to the excitement and unexpectedness that seemed to transform each of my grandma’s visits to us into something epic and odyssecic.. i can’t help wondering if this is because of where i’m sitting.

the only occasions where i’ve got properly chatting to fellow travellers has been either with pissed up football fans.. or with passengers reading cool books..

so if we are going to live with out smoking carriages then we need a designated drinking carriage or perhaps a short bibliophiles aisle