The nightmare train journey from Hell

Just returned from the nether regions of darkest East Midlands… Nottingham to be precise. About the reasons for the weekend jaunt my lips must forever remain sealed, however…

…the trip back augured to be fraught with incident as soon as I decided to skip the imminently departing train to instead share a final coffee with my mate, and lining myself up for the last train of the night going to my destination.

So, coffee shared, my mate waved off on his journey, an hour or so wait for my train (just chillin’ out man) and then attempt to jump aboard.
And here comes the first warning. There’s a sign announcing that for x,y,z destinations passengers should board one of the first five carriages. Only problem was, the first five carriages were locked down tight. No-one inside any of them. Everyone crammed into the remaining carriages. And no connecting corridor! Hmm.

Oh well. Join the rest of the herd and just hope for the best, but not without a few twinges of anxiety wondering whether I’d end up at my intended destination, or somewhere completely else… stuck out in the middle of nowhere and no hope of getting back on the right track ’til daybreak.
“Don’t be silly” I told myself. “It’ll all be ok.”

So there we all are, sat on the train. Or in my case, standing cos the train’s full to the brim.
Now, just to put this in context, I’d spent virtually the entire weekend standing about in various cold places (attending to matters about which my lips shall remain sealed) so I’d really been looking foward to a nice relaxing sit-down on the train back home. Oh well.

Anyhow, to resume… so there we all are, on the train, waiting to depart. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Then its announced over the p.a. that one of the train crew (turned out to be the guard) had been delayed and therefore the train would be late departing. As though we hadn’t already guessed that.

Eventually however the chap arrives and off we all go, accompanied by the sound of his voice over the train’s p.a. offering his apologies. Or at least, that’s what we all thought he was offering cos it seems the p.a. had suddenly developed some sort of a glitch (loose wire or something) so we can only really hear about one word in six. Very strange.

What you need to visualise now is my actual location on the train. As I’d said, the train was full. And, having failed to get into any of the first five carriages I’d jumped through the door of the very next carriage along which seemed to be a sort of “end-point” cos there was no connecting corridor between this and the front carriages (as already observed); instead, there was a sort of little cubby-hole for the guard.
And I couldn’t get into the carriage proper as it was full up (people standing in the aisle as well!), so I was stuck in the little corridor place where the exits are.

[Edit 04 March '08: Having re-read this post a number of times, and reflecting back on the experience, I'm beginning to develop the sneaking suspicion that I'd probably got confused between the front and the rear of the train, so in attempting to get as close to the front as possible I'd actually managed to position myself right at the back of the train, that would have just happened to be the last of the first five carriages! Which of course is totally consistent with the way I've managed to bumble through life so far.]

Which meant of course that I was privy to what was going on in the guard’s “cubby hole”. And what was going on in the guard’s “cubby hole” was that he seemed to be trying to repair the on-board computer! (Apparently it runs Windows CE. Who the hell uses Windows CE, and when are they gonna get a brain?)
Seems it wasn’t working. Instead of displaying on the LED thingy in each coach the stations we were to stop at it was actually showing the station from which we’d just departed as our destination.

Ho hum. “There’s definitely something not quite right about this journey”, thinks I.

We eventually pull into Leicester station and I allow myself a slight glimmer of hope that the rest of the journey will pass without incident (having queried from the guard whether I’m actually in the right part of the train for my destination, and been assured that I am).
But no sooner had I allowed myself such a glimmer than I noticed a distinct absence of movement. In fact, a rather prolonged distinct absence of movement.
Lo and behold, the p.a. springs into life (or half-life to be more accurate, reminding all us passengers of its one-in-six glitch) and informs us that there’ll be a slight delay due to a changeover in drivers, and that the replacement driver has been held up somewhere.
And so we wait. And wait. And wait.
Until at last things start happening again and off we go once more. “At last. Should all be plain sailing from here” I tell myself, looking at watch and trying to calculate what time I’ll arrive at my destination.

But then, guess what? The train grinds to a halt somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. This proves to be the first of a number of such unscheduled stops due, we are informed, to signals failure in the area north of Kettering.

All these delays have of course added up to a significant amount of time. In fairness to the railway company, they had announced free tea and coffee for us all, but this was probably a vain attempt to pacify another situation that appeared to be developing.
Seems quite a few of the passengers on the train were expecting to make connections with other transport that was of course all dependent upon timing. And now they’d missed their connections. And, quite understandably, some of them were getting rather irate. Which explains how I came to witness the almost-punchup between a leery Scottish “gentleman” and the guard. All within inches of me (remembering where I was stuck). Having been a devout coward all my life I find this seriously worrying, and desperately wish myself elsewhere. Didn’t happen of course (neither the punch-up or my being elsewhere).

That situation resolved the train finally passes through Kettering and at last things seem to smooth out a bit. Oh… apart from the mildly irritating fact that the automatically closing door into the carriage proper appeared to have developed a fault and was constantly opening and closing by an inch or so.
And the other rather more annoying fact that the train’s heating system seemed to have packed up and I was getting increasingly chilly. Dammit. As though I hadn’t suffered enough cold over the entire weekend.

Anyhow, the uneventfulness of the journey post-Kettering (in stark contrast to the annoyances of the pre-Kettering leg) meant that now I also had to contend with sheer boredom, so ended up amusing myself by photographing the miniscule compartment I was in. (Oh, the so-sad depths to which we’ll sink when the adversity of circumstances overwhelms us!)

Oh… almost forgot to mention… the totally bizarre nature of the journey seemed somehow to be reinforced by the discovery that our driver was French! (as revealed by his accent when speaking over the p.a.). S’pose I should count myself lucky I didn’t end up somewhere over the other side of the English Channel!

The one high spot of the entire weekend was that I did actually manage to get a few pics in between my other activities (about which my lips shall remain sealed).