It is the blackest midnight of the soul. It's like dying. One can almost feel the life force being sucked from one's body as one's will to live ebbs away. It is the closest thing in this world to being stranded in a formless limbo - a hellish void in which all of one's desires, one's joys, one's ambitions are systematically stripped away leaving nothing but an all-consuming ennui, a paralysing torpor. It is...the last train home. And I hate it.
And you know what's so strange? The last train home - the train that runs when the rest of the world is asleep and the line is empty - is the slowest effing train of the day! And that was certainly true of last night.
After an enjoyable evening on the town with a work contact, I make it to Paddington for 11.20pm and clamber aboard a fairly empty first class carriage. At least I have my off peak upgrade to look forward to. For a moment my mood lifts...but then it is slammed to the canvas and crushed there.
The train manager makes that most hated of announcements: the replacement bus service from Swindon. Argh! The 12-13 minute journey from Swindon to Chippenham immediately elongates to a 40 minute haul through the back streets of Swindon and a darkened motorway. Not good.
Then the next blow. The train manager again: the service is going to be delayed for 30 minutes before leaving Paddington because some crew are stuck on a delayed incoming service. We haven't even left the station yet and already my journey through the sleeping hinterland of England has grown by an hour! Will I ever get to bed? I've got to get back up at 6am to return to London so it's not looking good.
After 15 minutes, the train manager announces that the staff have arrived but have foregone their break in order to get the train moving. I'm grateful - we all are - but that gratitude soon wains as the train crawls agonisingly slowly to Reading, struck behind another service.
After Reading we virtually grind to a halt. Engineering works. I try to concentrate on reading my novel, but I can't: the frustration is enormous. All the time the delay is getting longer and longer and my chance of getting a half-decent kip is being eroded. As we chug through the darkness, men in bright orange clothing out on the track wave to the driver. It's a surreal sight.
We're approaching Didcot, comes the announcement. No we're not, it transpires. It's a further 10 minutes before we reach the soulless armpit of Oxfordshire and then head off into the night once more. But at least now we're moving at a decent speed. But only as far as Swindon, then it's onto the bus and we wait 10 minutes for the stragglers, the time slipping away. It's now 1.20am and my brain is turning to mush.
We finally reach Chippenham Station just before 2am. I repeat: 2-a-fucking-m. Unbelievable! Then I have to walk over the station bridge right down to the far end of the car park to where my car awaits - a welcome sight.
On the walk I chat to a fellow hapless passenger, a woman. She tells me she's in the music business and often catches the last train. "It's never on time," she tells me. "Every night, something different. Some problem or delay or failure. It's a nightmare."
Literally, I muse to myself. A nightmare.
I make it home at 2.10am and crawl into the spare bed without waking the family. Initially I can't sleep - my mind is whirring - maybe falling into unconsciousness around 2.30am. I wake briefly about four, then am woken at 6.10am by my wife and children getting up.
I get up, shower, drink a cup of tea and then drive back to the station to catch the 7.25am, a zombie whose hopes and dreams still seem to be lost somewhere out there in the endless miles of darkness between Reading and Didcot.
1 comments:
Regarding the 23:30 Paddington - Cardiff never being on time, I've been on it more times than I care to think in the last few months, and it usually runs pretty much to it's advertised timetable +/- 2/3 minutes. A lot of people think it's running late, but in fact it has different running times to allow for the maintainence work that is carried out overnight. Check out the timetable. Also, this train is quite often subject to re-timings and changes due to engineering works (Network Rail = Act of God), it's always worth checking if any have been advertised before turning up for it.
On Wednesday, as well as the crew turning around in ten minutes, another driver, on his way home after finishing work, suggested that he take the train as far as Swindon, so that the booked driver could have his compulsory break on-board. This meant him having to be taxied back to Reading, and getting home a lot later than if he had just sat in Paddington waiting for the driver to finish his break. (A lot of us do go the extra mile - pun intended)
The announcement before Didcot was a simple mistake - trying to tell where you are looking out the window of a train at night is not as easy as you might think.
Apologies again from the crew about the delays you had - we did our best to minimise them. The bus was totally outside our control. However, as another poster has said, it was your choice to have a late night followed by an early morning start, I don't think you can put the blame for that on FGW or the individual crew.
Post a Comment