GNER Restaurant Car, to various destinations including Leeds, York and Edinburgh. Meal for two, £65, train fare not included
(08457 484 950 for train times)

I have had more stupid working days. There was the time, for example, when I flew to Switzerland on easyJet to buy a particular brand of vinegar, only to discover it was a bank holiday and all the shops were shut. 'If the plane had crashed and you had died,' my wife said, 'no one would have claimed it was in a worthwhile cause.' She could have said the same about my latest venture: I got on a train solely to have lunch. And then came back again.

I can explain. The Anchor & Hope near Waterloo is one of my favourite food pubs. They have a gutsy, visceral approach - duck-gizzard salads, cassoulets to share - which makes me happy. Sadly, they have an irritating policy of not taking bookings. All very pub, I'm sure, but I will not wait two hours for food like that. It's good, but not two-hours-in-the-bar good. Recently, the train company GNER updated their restaurant-car menu, adding dishes from famous gastro-pubs like the Blue Lion in East Yorkshire and, hurrah!, the Anchor & Hope. Now I could eat its food without queuing. Which was why I went to King's Cross and bought a standard-fair ticket to York with no intention of visiting the city.

First, a word of warning. Though you can eat in the restaurant car on a standard ticket, they give first-class passengers preference, and for a few minutes it looked like I wouldn't get a seat (which would have put this day right up there with the Swiss adventure). Then one came free and I took my place as we streaked through the countryside, bathed in winter sunshine, passed fields crusted with the first snows of winter. To add to the pleasure, by chance I got the Anchor & Hope menu.

It is encouragingly butch. As well as the pub's dishes, there are things like butternut squash, lentil and cumin soup, sausage and mash, and calf's liver. I started with crab mayonnaise, a mix of brown and white meat flavoured with Worcestershire sauce, mustard and lemon juice. It lacked the fibrous texture of the white meat but the flavour was rich and powerful, with a fine long end from the mustard. The menu said it came with a sweet chilli sauce but thankfully it didn't, just some baby leaves dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. For my main I chose the guest dish, a slow-baked duck leg with a rich jus. This is sensible on-train cookery. The cooking can be done elsewhere and finished on board with no loss of quality. I doubt the Anchor & Hope meant parts of the leg to be carbonised, but this didn't interfere with the flavour.

I am judging these dishes by what's on the plate and not by the usual standards of British train catering. By those standards, this really is very good food, though expensive. Would the Anchor & Hope charge £15.50 for the duck leg? Probably not. Order before 3pm, though, and GNER throw in pudding for free, in this case a riff on creme caramel, in which the caramel was replaced by a sauternes reduction - though the creme had split slightly.

Other dishes ordered by my fellow travellers looked a little less successful. Baked cod with Welsh rarebit had the rarebit on top of the skin, which produces flabby results. The calf's liver looked overdone. Sadly, I had no time for further post-mortem. We were pulling into Doncaster, so I paid, got off, ran across the platform and picked up the London train going south. It's like working, only different.