Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 May 2007 21:14:03
To Lancashire to see my Mum's new house
Great thing about living in a city with complex public transport is that there are so many ways to get anywhere. They may all be slow and unpleasant, but there are lots of them.
I got a bus to Lewisham Station intending to take the DLR to Bank and Northern Line to Euston. And then found that, as this is the dreaded Bank Holiday Weekend the DLR was closed from Mudchute to Westferry Circus. (In passing, one of the reasons so many car drivers think that trains are shit in Britain is that they only ever take them on non-working days - when they are usually shit - long-distance trains usually work fine on weekdays outside holiday times). So I took the mainline to London Bridge instead, intending to get the Northern Line to Euston. And got there to find that it was closed for track works as well, or at least the Bank branch was. So I got the Jubilee line to Waterloo, changed to the other side of the Northern Line, and went up that way, and still got there with 25 minutes to spare. Has I known about the tube I might have taken the train to Victoria instead and gone to Euston on the Victoria Line. Or had there been no trains at all at Lewisham I could have taken the bus to New Cross Gate and gone up to London Bridge from there - or possibly even got the East London Line to change to Jubilee at Canada Water or through to Whitechapel to get on the Met or the Hammersmith and City to Euston Square. Or if no tubes at all I could have carried on by bus to the Elephant or to Bricklayer's Arms and another bus via Aldwych for there - a journey that to night only takes 40 minutes, not counting waiting time, but is probably a lot longer in the Saturday shopping times.
Try doing that with the once every third Tuesday services you get in most places.
complexity makes the system more redundant which makes it more robust and possibly more resilient.
That got damn near a train-spotting post....
We just passed Watford Junction.
Talking of trainspotting, this is a Virgin train and its a bank holiday so I suppose we are lucky its moving. No buffet though. I could do with a cup of tea :( I should have realised and got one at the station (even though it was Euston)
Either that or their brand-merge with NTL has infected the railway operation with whatever dread disease destroyed customer service from that Lewisham head-end, passed on from Videotron to cable and Wireless to NTL and now to Virgin. The Internet is fine, and the cable TV is more or less fine except taht it mysteriously needed a new box at our end that they didn't tell us about till the bloke came round supposedly to fix the phone which doesn't work and hasn't worked for four months now, but a new phone company would make me take at least a day of work to install their line and this is cheap, considered as a way of paying for cable TV and Internet connections, so the phone is an optional extra really. Or in this case, not an extra, because Virgin/NTL don't know how to make their phones work.
Train driver (or whoever does these things) just announced that "hopefully" a "we will be picking up a member of the onboard catering team" at Coventry or at Birmingham International. Halfway there & I bet it takes 40 minutes to get everything ready & then there will be a queue.
Why is it that when you start thinking about food and drink you want some? If I wasn't on this train I'd probably still be in bed at the moment (12:30 on Saturday, a civilised time for a lie-in), or maybe just getting and having a bath wouldn't have dreamed of getting food or tea yet.
We've been waiting at Rugby for a long time...
... and the food bloke finally got on at New Street, and didn't open till we were well beyond Birmingham, and there were 18before me in the very slow queue including someone whose credit card didn't work and who was 60p short (in the end another customer gave him the 60p because it was going on so long) and I was still in the queue at Stafford, and at Crewe, and got back to my seat just in time for Warrington.
But trains are good. Really.