Don’t let my Train take the Strain

I wasn’t even going to mention the fact that my train was 20 minutes late this morning. There’s only so many ways I can write about having to catch the next train, being crammed in, getting held up and so on and so forth. But SouthWest Trains are nothing if not inventive in finding new and more interesting ways (and I’m using ‘interesting’ in its loosest possible sense here, obviously) to compound the misery.

Basically, the 7:41 (which regular readers with few friends and little excitement in their lives will remember is the eight-car train) was ‘delayed’ this morning, with no further information as to how delayed and ominous warnings over the tannoy that it might be cancelled. Next up was the 7:56 Weybridge train, a four-car sardine special made even more sardine-like by the presence of the disappointed 7:41 passengers. So far, so normal. The train got more and more crowded, and consequently more and more late, until we got to Barnes. At Barnes we paused, and the driver got onto the tannoy to announce that we were held at a red signal to allow the delayed 7:41 train to catch up with us so we could take on the rest of its passengers. Clearly somebody somewhere had noted that there was still a little smidgen of space on our train – nobody was actually perched on the luggage racks, for example, and there was probably still only one passenger per toilet cubicle – so they could ditch the by now doomed 7:41, turn it around, and go off and meet their punctuality targets somewhere else more glamourous like, I don’t know, Mortlake. Sure enough, we sat and watched through the windows as the 7:41 arrived in all its eight-car splendour on the next platform, offloaded its remaining passengers, and sailed off into the sunset. Then we had to sit and wait while the passengers climbed over the footbridge to our platform, got to the Weybridge train and tried to cram themselves on.

And even then we couldn’t get away. Because as the pips went and the doors failed to close, the guard got onto the tannoy once more: ‘Will the person who’s blocking the door with their bag please move it away so we can get away.’ Because, after all, at the end of the day, it’s always the passengers’ fault…