rashbre central: unplugged without warning

Tuesday 17 January 2012

unplugged without warning

Towards Park Lane
I should have noticed the warnings as I arrived at the train station early today. Instead I was more intent on getting a ticket.

There was a line of animatedly talking people at the ticket office so I tried the machine instead.

I picked the right option from the variety of very similar sounding train ticket types and made it to the platform with a couple of minutes to spare.

Thats when I noticed the surprisingly small number of people waiting today. The rest must have known something that I didn't.

I looked towards the digital sign. Instead of showing train times and an estimate of how many minutes delay, it had another message.

"Bus service only due to overnight theft of signalling cables"

I started to plan an alternative route and then suddenly an overfull train appeared. It wasn't the correct one, but it was going in the right direction.

I decided to get on and see how far I could go before being turfed onto a bus. I was slowly moving my mindset back to that of a rail traveller.

The train was only about 20 minutes late at this point. By the time we arrived at the destination it was an hour and a half late.

Still, I had my Kindle with today's news on it to read whilst I stood in the train's corridor for around two and a half hours.

2 comments:

Imaginography said...

Kindle saves the day! It sounds like the usual standard of service (ok, I exaggerate a bit) but at least it was a better excuse than 'leaves on the line'!

rashbre said...

Imaginigraphy I had sort of forgotten just how often there would be a train glitch until this last week when I've been using the train fairly frequently. I may have just been unlucky, but I have a slight sense of deja-vu.