Knowing All About Trains

KNOWING ALL ABOUT TRAINS by Neil McCall

I am a Man Who Knows All About Trains. Or, at least, used to be. This
was brought home to me this week when I had to travel to Edinburgh for
a work team meeting on Tuesday; there was a through train from
Manchester Piccadilly at 13:26 and all I had to do was make sure I
caught it, sit back and at some time around five p.m. I would get off
at Edinburgh Haymarket, a two-minute walk from our hotel. Easy enough?
Well, not for me. I left myself a perfectly adequate hour to get to
Piccadilly from home but a mysterious and lengthy early afternoon
traffic jam around the University (bloody student demo??) saw me still
on Oxford Road with only ten minutes to go. Now, almost all trains
heading north-west from Piccadilly also stop at Oxford Road station
but, being a MWKAAT (and having being on the internet to check this
out) I knew that the Edinburgh train didn't. Nonetheless I jumped off
the bus at Oxford Road and ran up the steep flight of stairs hoping to
grab a train into Piccadilly which might just connect with the
Edinburgh train. There wasn't one due for ten hopeless minutes, but I
had MWKAAT plan B which was to jump on the Southport train which was
just arriving, get off at Bolton and hope that the Edinburgh train
didn't do anything sneaky like go round us whilst we were stopped at
Salford Crescent. It didn't, and we bowled along to Bolton safe in the
knowledge that the Edinburgh train was still behind us. Made it!

But when I alighted at Bolton I couldn't see the Edinburgh train either
on the timetable or the monitor screen - although I COULD see it coming
along the track towards me. It came ? and cruised through the station
at ten miles an hour without stopping. But ALL trains stop at Bolton!!
Not any more, apparently. I knew that I had just wasted another two
hours. Edinburgh seemed a long, long way away.

Eventually a stopping train to Preston turned up and trundled slowly in
a northwesterly direction, and when I arrived at Preston I was an hour
down already. But was my luck seemed about to change, for almost
immediately a Glasgow train pulled in which meant that I was
definitely, definitely going to Scotland. But Glasgow and Edinburgh are
not at all the same place!

Virgin trains were not having a good day either; a signalling problem
at Penrith cost us a twenty-minute delay, and I had to swallow my
MWKAAT pride and ask the train conductor for advice (oh, the shame of
it, having to take railway advice from a young girl!). But she had all
the timetable details in a device around her neck and advised me that I
could either wait for a connection at Carlisle for an hour and a half,
travel on to Glasgow Central and cross the city to Queen Street for the
Edinburgh train or change at Motherwell. This latter intrigued me, as
Motherwell is not on any direct line to Edinburgh; I chose this as the
educational option.

Motherwell was reached around half-an-hour late, a further delay being
encountered when some idiot dropped something on to the overhead wire
just outside the town. I looked for the time of the train connection to
Edinburgh and found none, so I had to resort to the dubious practice of
asking at the station information office, a place hitherto regarded (by
me) as the preserve of the unenlightened in matters transportorial.
There would allegedly be a GNER train at 18:16, which meant that I had
half-an-hour to see the sights of Motherwell. This proved an
over-generous provision by at least twenty-nine minutes, and I was soon
back on the station to find that the 18:16 would not be arriving on
time, in fact the station staff had no idea where this train actually
was but it appeared to be nowhere in the western part of Scotland at
all, so the staff at GNER were endeavouring to find another train as
substitute. Back to the information office; yes, I could get a local
train to a place named Bellshill and wait for another local train
there, or I could go into Glasgow as the original option, but the best
advice he could give was to sit tight and wait for GNER to sort it out.
I was beaten; my MWKAAT knowledge was sketchy in Scotland and I was
condemned to waste yet more time in Motherwell. GNER actually run the
trains on the East Coast main line to Edinburgh but extend some of them
across to Glasgow and it was one of these which had much earlier come a
cropper in another overhead line incident at Northallerton, but to be
fair they conjured up a replacement train quite quickly and it duly
arrived for the last leg of my journey half-an-hour later. I ended up
passing through Carstairs eastbound well over an hour since passing
through northbound, and I then found out that the GNER train didn't
stop at Edinburgh Haymarket. But ALL trains stop at Haymarket ? oh,
rats, I've been down this line, metaphorically speaking, once already
today. At Edinburgh Waverley I finally retraced my steps to Haymarket
on the Inverness train hoping that I wouldn't fall asleep after turning
a three-and-a-half hour journey into a six-hour marathon involving five
trains instead of one.

All my work colleagues had arrived in Edinburgh without incident and
were halfway through their curry when I arrived; I found a
fish-and-chip shop, wolfed down some scran and joined them in the pub,
my reputation as transport supremo in risible tatters.
On the return journey home my MWKAAT advice to change at Preston
instead of Carlisle was comprehensively ignored, and who can blame
them?