My living hell...or let the train take the strain

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I went to Devon on 29th October (for those that don’t know, it’s a county in south west england) by train…from Hemel Hempstead (near London) with a small dog.

Not too bad, you may be thinking (or you may be thinking I’m nuts for taking the train in the first place, or at least for taking a dog on it…). However, that was the weekend that Railtrack decided to admit that they had cocked everything up for the past xx years, check the tracks & impose speed restrictions everywhere… Wait for it, it can & does get worse!

I caught a train an hour and half before I needed to in order to get into London to drag the poor dog round the tube system…the train was half an hour late, but everyone loved the dog and we got a seat!

The tube system was running ok, but I’m going to go into serious weightlifting/marathon training before I take a dog on there again! (& he’s only a small dog!). He made lots of conquests again.

Got on an earlier train to Devon than I would have & thought “even allowing for restrictions, I’ll still get there at the normal time”…can’t you see that this is running way too smoothly?

Got a seat & the dog made yet more conquests (including sniffing noses with a nice collie - apparently I wasn’t the only one mad enough to take a dog…).

Discovered that the train would stop at Tiverton (never heard of it before), where we would all be put on coaches and sent to Exeter to continue our journey. This seemed ok…someone even went along the train as we got closer to count heads to radio on ahead how many people there were & how many coaches would be needed.

It then started to rain. A cold, bitter, wind-driven rain.

We got off at Tiverton, which is a teeny-tiny station that doesn’t even have room in the waiting room for all the people on the train…to find 2 coaches departing, already full with the last people from the previous train and staff who had been told that the train was nearly empty…

Given the vast amount of information that got passed on, most of us didn’t trust them enough to go into the waiting room to wait, thinking we wouldn’t be called and would be there all day…and those that did, came out again since it was too crowded and the floor was slippery and dangerous.

So we stood in the rain & waited…and waited…and waited…finally a coach came! After a mad stampede, we were finally told that it was a plymouth coach instead, and the stampede headed back the other direction (Moses could part the red sea, but not a crowd like that…).

Val (my dog), was soaked through & had just begun to shiver, when finally an Exeter coach arrived, so the stampede began again, which I tried to keep on the edge of, having a small trample-able dog.

I got a seat quite easily and then we set off to Exeter. I put my jumper on top of my dog to keep him warm and sat him on my lap to share body heat (I knew climbing & hill walking was good for something!) - when he stopped shivering, I poked him every few minutes to check he was still conscious…poor dog, he had just got warm & gone to sleep & I kept waking him up!
After travelling through wild & windy weather, we got there, to discover no one waiting to give directions to the platform that we all needed, so a huge queue formed (I just waited and asked the first people to emerge…). Even when we got directions, there turned out to be no trains anyway! Eventually, they decided to put on a taxi to Newton Abbott & went to count heads…there were several hundred people there, a large proportion of whom wanted to go there. So they canned that idea, and disappeared without giving us any information.
Eventualy some bright spark thought of another coach (couldn’t have been one of the staff members :rolleyes: ) & told us there would be a coach, but not where to go to find it…
I was about fifth to the coach, and then we sat there for ages. Meanwhile, early people began to get off to get drinks etc and so when they finally had everyone, they had to go and round them up.

Finally we set off and eventually got there - but the coach leaked, so we got wet again!

And a four hour journey had only taken 8.5 hours (& my dog now holds the family record for leg-plaiting ability!)…

so sympathy, similar stories, accolades for my dog, etc welcome…(the return journey was fairly bad, but I’ll save that for another post…)

2

That really sucks Fierra, I don’t have any travel horror stories, well except for going home tonight (a foot and a half of snow), I hope the rest of the trip went better and you had fun in Denmark. I’ve been following your flooding for the last few days and I kind of figured that’s why you hadn’t been posting here again. Glad you made it back more or less safe and sound.

Keith

P.S. When I saw your picture on the People pages, you looked just like I thought you would.

3

This is why I drive everywhere. You know, Captain of my own ship, and all that stuff. Plus my dog rides comfortably in the back seat, even if he does get pupkus (wet dog nose residue) all over my windows.

Probably not what you want to hear, but just think, fierra, it could have been worse - you could have been in this country riding Amtrak, wondering if the train you were on was going to make it’s destination without derailing, hitting another train, or plowing a vehicle at a crossing.

Since the rest of your trip was good, at least you got the worst of it out of the way early. (Your poor little dog! And his Mum, too!) From speaking with other Brits, the rails were a mess with all of the flooding - has it improved any?

4

Nope. I’m commuting from London to a client in Weybridge, and every train is delayed. At Waterloo this morning every train to Portsmouth or Southsea was cancelled thanks to flooding around the south coast. My workmate on this job was stuck for six hours in a tunnel on a train from Cardiff to Paddington last week, and a friend of mine couldn’t visit her parents as there were no trains getting through to Newcastle.

5

I have a friend near Yorkshire that is also having flooding and train problems. I feel your pain fierra.

6

well, at Christmas, the other two dogs, plus Val & I are going to ride in style in my car…three dogs would be ridiculous to take on the train (& I’d have to pay for the third one…), but since I was starting a new job the day after I got back (other main reason for not posting - busy at new job, & hibernated this weekend - except for a trip to a very nice unflooded bonfire night…), & I have RSI, I didn’t want to strain my arms with a 3.5h drive (each way) before starting. Christmas I will have more time between drives & settled into the new job etc, so it isn’t so much of an issue.

& how is that different from here? They’ve had one or two accidents/derailments since they started the reduced speed approach!

nope, I’m just saving the return train trip for another posting (extra dose of sympathy then!). On the plus side, I did see over 80 swans (probably mute swans), 2 grey herons, and a coal cash & carry yard from the train on the way back…it went a different (longer, delayed) route, so I’d never seen the coal place before.

I know, I felt sorriest for the dog - but he didn’t eat whilst I was in Denmark, so leaving him at home with the other two wasn’t really an option. My rucksack with my dry change of clothing also got soaked through - I think that’s adding insult to injury!

Denmark was fine Odie - the weather going across & back was calm & it was sunny for the 6 hours that we were actually ashore. I learnt one word in Danish, but I don’t know how you spell it - “takt” which means thank you (I asked one of the shop keepers what “thank you” was, so I wouldn’t be totally ignorant & could be vaguely polite). The shop keepers were nice, the people were all friendly & virtually everyone seemed to speak English (perhaps not that surprising since it was a main England to Denamrk port, and its closest town that we visited (Esbjerg & Ribe), but useful nevertheless)), we saw a lot of wind farms (they produce a fifth of their power from that & don’t allow any nuclear fuels) & they have a higher number of bikes per person tahn even Holland (sorry coldy!) and the food on the boat was gorgeous. When I got home (relatively undelayed by trains), I walked through the front door & my mom instantly phoned to ask how badly affected I had been by the gales and rain that they had had the last few days, so we were very lucky with the crossings. I’d definitely go again - for a longer time & see more things (before global warming sinks the place, it’s very flat!)

7

fierra, I understand your problem well–I was planning a trip to Aberdeen (from Oxford to watch a football match, but I’ve kind of balked after I was told that the journey might now take 13 hours (13!)

Heard about the Oxford Express bus crash today? Damn, I’ve taken that bus about 100 times in the five-and-a-half years I’ve lived here. I’ve taken it a lot of times in bad weather and I’ve always been worried about a crash. There’s a particular spot about 15 miles east of Oxford which always seemed troublesome, and that’s exactly where the crash happened. Troubling.

8

Duke, I know what you mean. On the train on the way to the port to go to Denmark I was telling the other passengers there had been another derailment. Not a happy feeling.