FORGET all that smug stuff in the British media about the way our troops (unlike the arrogant and out-of-touch Yanks) know how to get on with the natives — every soldier a diplomat, etc — and have turned their southern Iraqi zone around Basra into a haven of peaceful reconstruction.

The place is a stinking mess and the townsfolk are unemployed and desperate.

There is far less to show for a year’s occupation than there should be, and if our (undoubted) attempts to make friends with the locals seem to have brought peace, then that will be because their Shia leaders have yet to stir the mob against us. Bigger forces are at work than can be tamed with a handshake, and all that goodwill could disappear in a puff of smoke.

I went to Basra by train. Incredibly, there still is one — just. Strangely, almost no Westerners seem to have tried it. True, there have been explosions, and attacks on trains; but the highway between the two cities is subject both to insurgency and banditry so that few motorists dare to travel by night, and goods vehicles travel in 30-strong convoys between US military Humvees.

The railway from Baghdad to Basra is the first section of what was once no doubt a grand British plan to link Syria to the Gulf. For some 500 dispiriting kilometres it runs not far from the Tigris but you never see the river, only a limitless, flat, ugly river basin: muddy scrub, fields of corn, palm groves sheltering the blackened hulks of Iraqi tanks that failed to hide and, as you get closer to the Tigris’s confluence with the Euphrates, endless mudflats, then marshes, reeds and trenches to either side and the occasional raised pole of a Marsh Arab’s canoe.

You leave the sad magnificence of Baghdad Central Railway Station at 8.30am, nosing through vast marshalling yards, derelict, littered with the occasional rusting hulk of a steam locomotive, and gathering speed across miles of untidy middle-class suburbs. Roads cross the track everywhere. All booms, gates and warning lights are long wrecked and the train simply whistles at trusting goats, Iraqis and motorised traffic to clear the track.

Our smart new green-and-yellow Chinese-made diesel loco pulled only three carriages, and there cannot have been more than thirty passengers on board. I quickly saw why. The carriages were smashed to bits. Doors were off, seats were ripped out, windows cracked and dust came belching up through holes in the floor. The whole 12-hour train ride to Basra cost little more than a dollar (a seat in a shared taxi costs 20 times as much) but even cash-strapped Iraqis have their pride. Only one other compartment in my carriage was occupied: by a gentle and charming Iraqi family, obviously poor, and too numerous — with six children — to fit in a car.

From one or two individuals a sense of luminous goodness is somehow communicated without words (they had only a few in English) and over the hours ahead I was seized with an intense fondness for Adnan and Leila, their four daughters, Hadir (who kept dusting my seat), Gofran, Hadil and Asraa, their son Ali and their tiny baby boy, Hossain, tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes. They lived in Basra but had been visiting Leila’s relations near Baghdad. We had a happy photo session together and I would like to have sent them the results, but there is no postal service in Iraq.

Some 50km out of Baghdad, at a station called Mahmodiga, our train stopped. There was an IED (improvised explosive device) scare at the next station, Iskandariyah. Nobody knew if or when we would be able to continue our journey. I paced the track and stared out over the litter of poor, flat-roofed little houses on either side of the track, all displaying their Shia flags of red, green or black — representing different mullahs — and listened to frogs singing from a big, filthy, reed-strewn puddle.

After an hour, passengers began abandoning our train, bags in hand, seeking road transport. Everyone was eating nuts (Iraqis pull sunflower seeds and roasted melon pips from their pockets as Americans pull Wrigley’s gum) and seeking information; nobody had any to offer; a lack which ran like a leitmotiv through all my time in Iraq. After two hours there was almost nobody but me and the photographer, and the nice family in the next-door compartment, too poor to pay for a taxi.

After three hours the loco whistled and moved off, we passengers jumping on before the carriages got up speed, the broken doors being easy to kick open. We soon passed Iskandariyah but saw no bomb, only a long-exploded bus and, later, a totally (but not recently) demolished oil-train, each tanker blown out by grenades.

This was unwelded track; the train proceeding with an old-fashioned clickety-click which grew to an urgent and hammering volume as our top speed of about 50mph was reached and sand (and sometimes, in the marshes, spray) billowed through the carriages. I hung from the door, a warm desert wind in my face. Two hundreds yards away a US military convoy kept pace on the highway which here ran in parallel. The pale, nervy faces of the American soldiers pointing guns from their Humvees — astonished to see an unarmed Westerner hanging from the train — were a picture.

We passed through stations whose names — al-Nasiriyah, Najaf — stirred vague memories of news reports of killings. As dusk fell the plain grew wetter and the marshes seemed to steal upon us, until the track was confined to a causeway; sometimes you could see lights, sometimes a little mud house on a piece of dry ground, and sometimes the outline of a long boat among the shadowy reeds. The clickety-click grew faster, almost panicky. We were catching up lost time.