If you ever leave the shores of this sceptred isle, you may notice that other European countries are gravely deficient in shoreline, and rather one country simply abuts another, the poor things. In light of this, some clever foreign sorts conceived of the idea of running railway lines from one country to another; so one can, for instance, travel from Paris to Brussels merely by taking a direct train, without needing to change at the border.

Given this, you can perhaps imagine the difficulties caused by platforms being of different heights where you board the train, from where you alight; the train cannot easily be at the right height for both stations. You might board the train easily, but face an unexpected severe drop when disembarking, or the other way around. Most inconvenient.

It is therefore in everyone’s interest, in continental europe at least, to agree what height to build platforms to, so that passengers can board in one country and alight smoothly in another. Due to our splendid isolation however, it is less important for us to do so.

The sensible solution, therefore, would be for continental countries to agree a common platform height, without seeking to impose upon the UK or Ireland, whose railways are mostly separate. And lo and behold, this is exactly what was agreed.