The Great Train Delay…
Well, what a day!
It’s Sunday 21st July and we check the train times as I’m due to travel up north from Kings Cross to Bentham Via Leeds but our narrowboat is moored at Roydon Marina and this meant catching the train from Royton station to Tottenham Hale and then the underground to Kings Cross.
A few days before this we’d realised that there were no trains leaving Roydon station early enough for me to catch my connection at KC as I was booked on the 10.30am train and I just presumed there would be plenty of trains as there normally is down south. So, I decided to change my train booking from Kings Cross to Bentham to a later train at the cost of £31.30. Then on the actual day of travel, as is standard in this country, trains from Roydon to Tottenham Hale were being delayed or cancelled due to signalling problems.
We decided to head to the station thirty minutes before the train was due to depart as the train kept updating as if it was just delayed and not cancelled. Finally, after much waiting and wondering as the information wasn’t forthcoming as we and others waited to see what would happen. The train finally showed as travelling past the stop with the signalling issues but just before it arrived at Roydon it changed to cancelled! Where had this train disappeared to, I do not know. Did a black hole appear? Aliens perhaps decided to abduct the whole train. The Bermuda triangle shifted location to just before Roydon station? At this point it’s was 11am and my train from Kings Cross was booked at 12.33pm and its approximately 50-minute travel by train to Kings Cross. As is also usual in this country, there was no staff on the platform to ask what to do, no offer of a replacement service. It was. Just. Cancelled.
As we are booking our Uber in desperation for me to try and catch my train, we get chatting to a couple of guys who left to get their car and they returned in a few moments and asked where we were going. They pulled over as the road is busy and one chap gets out and runs back and says they could drop us at another station, but after checking on his phone it’s too far away and there would be no way I would catch my train, but how nice of them to stop and go out of their way to help.
Chris orders me an Uber at the cost of £31.93 and throws me in the cab with his best wishes. He was going to come with me but already the travel costs are spiralling and we cannot afford to pay for him to get a taxi back to the marina and if the signals are still not working, he might not be able to get back, because at this point, who the duck knows!
The taxi arrives around 8 mins later and the driver is wonderful and is on a mission to try and get me to Tottenham Hale on time, 12pm by his sat nav, where I will have 33 minutes to get to Kings Cross underground and then to the main station. A worrying 50 min car journey later and we arrive there at 12pm dead on. At this point I decide I can do this so I leg it as fast as my pale, mosquito bitten legs would carry me. I’d had a bit of an allergic reaction to a bite, as I do and with a red, swollen plate sized lump on my leg, I power through and make it to the underground.
It’s fine. It’s 12.07pm. I can do this. I rush as quick as any person can on the underground trying to resist the urge to push people out of the way and scream – stop dawdling can manage! On the platform it’s 1 minute until the next train. Result. Only three stops and then its Kings Cross. Easy. First stop Seven sisters the doors open and people get off and people get on and the doors don’t close. Uh oh! I know what’s going to happen and sure enough they announce they are holding the train so it doesn’t catch up with the train in front.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. I take a deep breath. That’s it. I will miss the train and have to get the next one and no doubt pay extra. As this point, I’m facing bankruptcy so what’s more money thrown at a ducking unreliable service. Have it all. Have. Every. Bloody. Penny. Give it to your sodding shareholders so they can buy another glass of champagne on their yacht and I hope they bloody choke on it, fall overboard and get eaten by a killer dolphin.
The doors close after a few minutes and off we go as the train whistles through the hot and loud tunnel which is probably destroying my DNA at a cellular level, my lungs are collapsing from the fumes, my ear drums shattered and I can only pray the heat can melt the fat around my middle-aged spread and at least I will get something out of this journey. My peri-menopause anxiety shifts between who gives and shit what will be will be, and overwhelming, chest pumping like an alien is about to burst of my chest and I realise why Ripley had nightmares.
I arrive at Kings cross and tried again not to side swipe dawdlers, who I can tell from the back of their heads and the way they saunter without a care in the world, that they don’t have to get a connecting journey. Where is the killer dolphin which has evolved to land life when you need it!
It’s 12.20pm and I will remind you my train is due to leave is 12.33pm. Well, I think to myself I have a whole 13 minutes as, for a change, the platform has been announced. Normally someone sits in a booth overlooking the train concourse watching the weary travellers cricking their necks, peering at the screen waiting for their platform number to be announced, ‘the person’ watches the sweating travellers glancing at the screen, checking their phone, looking at their luggage, wondering if they will be able to break the world record for fast walking with a case to the platform when they decide to announce three minutes before it’s due to set off. Anyway, the person in charge of the platforms announcements today must have been feeling generous. Maybe they’d just received a notification of a shareholder bonus or perhaps the chiropractors in the local area were fully booked from all the previous travellers who had come this way and already had a healthy bonus incoming so had no need to make people wait until the last minute. Who knows. Anyway, platform 5 is the one for me. I’ve got ages.
Starbucks and a coffee and food beckons but I have 13 minutes. Interestingly our pontoon number in the marina is 13 and the ticket £31.30 and the cab £31.93 – is 3 an unlucky number for me or is it 1? I pick up some water, because at this point my peri-meri body looks like a whale which has been lathered in lard and locked in a sauna for a week. I cannot find just a normal sandwich, so grab a bacon roll. But people are bloody faffing and when I finally get the counter, I have no time to wait to have the bacon roll to be heated, so declared I will just pay for the water and have a chocolate croissant and leave the bacon roll. Somehow, due to a language barrier and my rush I ended up paying for an uncooked bacon roll I cannot eat, so that’s another £11 spent but at least there isn’t a three in it but there is a 1 so maybe that’s my unlucky number.
I leg it to the train and my mozi bite is well and truly throbbing and I wonder if I should have just called an ambulance and make them believe there is a specialist mozi bite hospital up north so they can take me to my destination. I made it with five minutes to go and climbed aboard with my uncooked bacon roll.
Someone is in my seat and very kindly moves but then I realise the seat sign says ‘available’. Oh, shit, I think. Have I done all of this, all of it, to actually find out I’ve booked the wrong train… an announcement not long after reassures me, that of course, there has been an issue with another train which was cancelled and they have piled everyone on this train and cancelled reservations. If anyone is reading this thinks I’m making it up then I can assure you, my fiction novels are just that. This is a memoir, a biography, or maybe this story will be printed about a lost author who never made it to her final destination but it is true.
People scrabble on and many nearly heated conversations about reserved seats but I settle down only for them to announce they are adding on extra stations to this journey, which is fair enough for the people whose train was cancelled but it means an extra 15 mins added to this train and I only have 15 mins Leeds before my next train at 3.32pm – those bloody 3’s and 1’s again!
I’m still without coffee and need food but at this point I’m probably delirious from my bite so once I’ve contracted rabies or something, I will content myself with eating my own arm; at least the scales will look good at weigh in next week. Then I remember the chocolate croissant.
Sitting on the train I decide to at least get the money back for the train ticket I booked through Trainline only to discover there is a £5 admin fee and they want me to return the tickets I couldn’t use because the ducking train didn’t arrive. What do they think I’ve done with the tickets????? Caught the ducking ghost train! Jumped on the tracks and stolen one of those ones you operate like from a cowboy movie? Well madam they say you still took the journey even if it’s means you’ve ended up with arms like popeye. In this day and age, they want me to pay for recorded delivery to post my train tickets… really??? Have you seen the state of the ducking Post office! Man alive have a word with yourself. I can just imagine the meeting at Trainline headquarters when they came up with that one – I bet their cheeks are still ache from laughing…
‘Go on add it to the terms and conditions.
‘No, I can’t, after their train has been cancelled, we are seriously going to ask our customers to send us their tickets even though we know all the trains are delayed or cancelled. We are going to ask them to then put them in an envelope, walk to the post office, pay to have them sent to us. Knowing! Knowing! What we know about the postal delivery and if they don’t send them recorded, they will never arrive and if they do, we will just shred them anyway and pretend we never received them. Stacey’s hamsters in HR loves shredded train tickets as it’s bedding. Surely, we cannot be that cruel. Even with recorded delivery you know we won’t receive them until 2090 and the ticket holder will be dead.’
General laughter and coughing/choking and the dolphins ears prick up, but sadly this process is added to the terms and conditions.
The train guard sounds like he’s been abducted from his previous job – maybe he used to be the main mental health trainer for dolphins and that’s why they are so wild and killing shareholders. Who knows, but he certainly is more forgetful than my peri-meri brain and that’s saying something but a bit worrying after the day I’ve already had for the train guard not to sound like they one hundred percent know where the train is going, at this point I will go wherever it takes me.
We arrive into Leeds only a few minutes late and I have 30 minutes so pop up to the Starbucks but my goodness you see some sights in London but I literally don’t look away quick enough when I spot a woman going up the escalator with the shortest shorts and no pants and everything, and I mean everything, is on show front and back judging by the looks on some faces ahead of me. Never mind that film Don’t look up, I’m looking sideways, down, across and any other way I can. This person was boldly going where no-one has gone before on Leeds station.
At Starbucks I think the results of my journey must be visible on my face as I dredge out the still sealed uncooked bacon roll from the bottom of my bag and as I order my cappuccino I say, ‘to cut a long story short I bought this in kings cross and didn’t manage to have it cooked would you mind?’
Here was me expecting him to turn around and say due to health and safety or some other stupid reason he couldn’t possibly do that but I was surprised when he smiles kindly and said, ‘of course and do you want some ketchup with that.’ I won’t say my faith in humanity is restored because I haven’t lost faith in people. If you look at social media or the news as your reference you will believe this to be true but I judge by my day-to-day meetings with people and most people I come across are nice. I don’t include greedy shareholders in this obviously.
My next train is in the station and I sit quietly eating my bacon butty and drinking my coffee before getting on the train. I decide in the end to sit on one of the seats with a table so I can finally start editing my canal book which I intended to do but ended up writing up this adventure as I needed to vent.
But oh no, that’s not the case. Two blokes get on and sit next to me and plonk their large cans of stella on the table and as they did this, a notification flashed up on my phone that the train I’m on is delayed. Oh, come on! I’m sure at this point you’re thinking I’ve embellished this story or made something up, I have already confessed to writing fiction after all, but no, this is a true factual account of my journey as a travel writer on this day.
It turns out the delay is only 3 minutes in the end. I know! I know! 3 again. The chaps have some interesting stories about accidentally setting a bag on fire outside Leeds station and police running towards them. Just an accident. They offer me a can of stella as well as checking if I’m an escort. I’m not sure how to take this so style it out as banter and have a laugh with them, declining the stella because even after a day like today, beer is not for me. If they had a bottle of prosecco, Baileys or Malibu I would have downed it in one.
I wish I’d spent this time editing my canal book but sometimes you just have to enjoy what life throws at you and tell the (true) story. I apologise for using the ducks name in place of a swear words, I’ve nothing against ducks unless they are pecking my narrowboat at 4am and waking me up. Also, I’m sorry to the dolphins, I’ve only ever encountered nice dolphins but I’m sure even they have bad days sometimes.
I receive a message from my mum asking me how many Yorkshire Puddings I want with my beef dinner and do I want dinner or a bath first. Living on a canal boat means a long soak in a bath is a luxury. Message answered I sit back and watch the beautiful Yorkshire countryside pass by and as the train announces the arrival into Bentham, as it turns out, I arrive, on time.
A very tired travel writer
C.L. Peache
P.S. I do battle with Trainline to get my money back and they agree to refund the £15 but I still have to send the tickets back recorded delivery! Seriously! Thank you to LNER and Northern trains and Starbucks for an excellent service.
P.S. I’ve emailed Great Anglia as they were the ones who operate the ghost trains which don’t turn up to see if I can get my taxi money back but I fell at the first hurdle when I tried to complete an online refund and they needed an address to process – I live on a boat and don’t have one so I emailed customer service.
