26 January, 2007

The Incredible vanishing train

East Croydon Station
I know it's all I seem to be going on about at the moment, but the Thameslink mucked up again today, this time in particularly spectacular fashion...Flyingpops has a meeting today (with a large UK Chocolate manufacturer) in Basingstoke, so instead of getting the London Bridge train she hopped on the slightly later Victoria one (with the intention of changing at Clapham Junction). I sat with her for one stop and changed at Redhill. It all looked normal, even the terminally dozy among my fellow commuters seem to have now cottened onto the fact that the train is stopping in a different place nowerdays, so everyone assembled, shuffling newspapers, adjusting scalves, blowing into cupped hands for warmth as the clock marched towards 08:14...then, with no announcement, no fanfare, the train just simply vanished from the display. Thus I found myself on a much later Victoria train than the one I had originally boarded, waiting at East Croydon (pictured above) in the snow, for a connection...

How can they not know that the train isn't running, embarrassed as they may be, if we knew a little earlier that it wasn't going to show up we could have made alternative arrangements? Even if they really didn't notice that it wasn't going to turn up until a minute before it was supposed to do so, shouldn't they have said *something*? There's just no excuse for it...

"Your Journey, Your Choice" speaks the corporate blurb on their home page, well, I think my choice will take me back to travelling in earlier on the London Bridge train (which turns up every day without fail and is never more than 3 minutes late)...

In other news, there was a big event in the Atrium in the office last night and for some reason they have left several extremely expensive looking displays of flowers behind, setting up this nice shot for me, with the canal museum there in the background... ;)
Flowers in the Office #2

2 comments:

bigbluemeanie said...

It's frustrating. I had a meeting this week with a client who recently moved from France to London and he was commenting how he feels he is going back in time when travelling on the trains here. It feels very 1970's with the stoppages, delays, etc. all the time.

Nice photo with the canal museum in the background!

Unknown said...

Thanks BB... ;)

Well, I've only travelled a little on trains in Europe, but (apart from the obvious language confusion that is bound to occur) everything has always been really good...!