Long journeys

I keep reading about rail traveller's horror stories. Since I've made two lengthy return journeys in the past week; I'll recount my experiences:

The first was a trip to the Birmingham NEC for the Warley Model Railway Exhibition, last Saturday. I hadn't bought a ticket in advance, and was presented at Slough with a long snaking queue for the one open ticket window. Fortunately there were a couple of guys with PORTIS machines willing to sell tickets to any destination provided you could pay cash.

Thames Trains services were still chaos following the derailment a few days earlier; they'd suspended normal services (including the Oxford semi-fasts), forcing me to take the substitute all-stations stopper to Reading. Fortunately this still had a good connection into a Virgin Trains Reading-Newcastle service formed by a five-car Voyager. This left Reading about half-full (the back half)

It left Reading on time, but lost about fifteen minutes at Oxford, stuck behind a kettle! Yes, there was a long train of maroon Mk1 coaches headed by GWR No. 7007 "Nunney Castle" let out in front of us. Not sure why, since it was promptly looped a mile north of the station to let us get in front of it again - perhaps they needed to clear the platform at Oxford.

The train filled up at Oxford, prompting an announcement from the train manager telling the people standing at the back of the train that there were plenty of seats in the front two coaches.

Return on Sunday night saw the 17:13 train to Reading arrive about ten minutes late. Another 5-car Voyager, this time very full. Although I managed to find a seat, the large number of passengers joining at Coventry filled up the aisles and vestibules making it impossible to get the buffet, sorry 'shop'. While Virgin claim that under 'Operation Princess', with train frequencies doubled but train lengths halved, the number of seats should be the same, this service highlights one of the problems: because of limited capacity on the Birmingham-Coventry-Leamington section, every other train has to be routed via the old GWR route via Solihull - so Birmingham International and Coventry still only have an hourly service, as before, only with much shorter trains.

My second long-distance journey of the week was much further, for a job interview in Edinburgh. The appointment in Edinburgh was at 10am, and the agency suggested I flew with one of the budget airlines. Unfortunately it turns out they all fly from Stansted, the wrong side of London, a good three hours away from where I live. A search on the Scotrail web site revealed it was possible to get a one-way sleeper berth for just �29 (from London, not including the connection from Slough), which seemed too good a bargain to be true.

It felt weird leaving home for a long journey at half-past nine in the evening. At this time of night, the ticket office was closed, the ticket machines decided they didn't like �2 coins, and there was no sign of a conductor on the trains, so Thames Trains lost some revenue for that part of the trip.

It's been 29 years since I last travelled on a sleeper (the long-discontinued Kensington Olympia-Stirling motorail on a family holiday). I arrived at Euston to find a long train of mauve-coloured sleeping cars, and an attendant holding a clipboard with a list of names.

Once on the move, I found it difficult to sleep. While I'm sure the ride in Mk3 coaches on continuous welded rail must be quieter than Mk1s on jointed track, I still only managed to sleep fitfully; I remember being woken up when the train took a reverse curve at speed somewhere on the northern section of the line, and again waking up when everything had fallen silent (even the air-conditioning), which must have been when they divided the train at Carstairs. The now-shortened train rolled in to Edinburgh on-time at 7.30

I was surprised to see the earlier sleeper (which carries portions to Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William) still in the station. I'm assuming this was badly delayed somewhere en-route; it did give me the chance to see a veteran class 37 on the four-coach Fort William portion.

Train spotters would probably like to know that I saw six classes of locomotive at Edinburgh Waverley, four of them hauling passenger trains.

The return was by a daytime GNER service which cost more than twice as much as the outward sleeper, about half-full and ten minutes late, although it made up some of this time on journey south. It's ironic that I travelled the much more scenic west coast line during the night, and the duller east coast line during the day.

Overall, none of the horror stories I keep reading about - the worst delay was only about 15 minutes, and the worst problem was the overcrowding on the return from Birmingham.