- [talking about her family's first trip on an HST 125 train]
- Michelle Sandell: The family story, which we never let my cousin forget, cos he was younger than us, is when he came running back down the train shouting out to my mum "Aunty Marion, I've done a poo at a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour". And we said "Yeah, you didn't really want to shout that out!".
- [talking about the repeated failures of the tilting Advanced Passenger Train when it was first brought into service, which led to its withdrawal after a few years]
- Prof Alan Wickens: It was put into service too quickly. If it had been allowed to be developed by the engineers, over a reasonable timescale, it would have been more reliable.
- [in "Round Trip to Glasgow", Peter Purves, the film's presenter, counters some of the bad press that the Advanced Passenger Train received]
- Peter Purves: It's smooth, it's quiet and an altogether delightful experience. Everything that the developers and designers have told me that the train should do, it does appear to do - and exceptionally well. I'll be in Euston a little over four hours after leaving Glasgow Central, and that's got to make this a train very much worth taking.
- [talking about why the Advanced Passenger Train project was abandoned and the trains scrapped]
- Peter Swift: So much of the equipment was totally new, and my view would be that there were too many new ideas in one train.
- Alan Marshall: The Advanced Passenger Train never had a chance because it never got the support it really deserved, particularly from the civil servants and politicians, maybe because none of them had any real long-term belief in the future of the railways.
- Kyle Bosworth: I think in the last ten years of British Railways, they'd got everything right and they were ripe for privatisation. And I think they should be given the credit for that.
- Alan Marshall: I think probably British Rail's biggest success was in preventing any more of the railway network being closed than many people wanted to achieve.
- [talking about the HST 125]
- Peter Swift: If someone had told me in 1975 that this train that you're working on will still be in front-line service in 40 years' time, I'd have said "Pull the other one". But it is!