F**king Madness

This is a shot taken at Birmingham New Street Station (described acutely by Arachne as a shopping centre with some trains attached), the scene of the height of the madness I experienced yesterday. I passed through today with plenty of time to make my connection (the cross-country service from Plymouth to Edinburgh), which, quite remarkably, was on time. The day before I had 4 minutes, which should really have been enough, only needing to get from Platform 7 to Platform 4. This is what I was confronted with. I ran to one side and then to the other. There was no way through. My brain couldn't compute this crazy barrier to onward travel. I started running around in a panic, looking for a sign or something I was missing. I think I even went back down to the platform I'd come from, sure I must have come up the wrong way. It turned out that there was no way to get between platforms without going through the barriers and back in again. I'm shaking my head right now as I write this. You truly can't make this stuff up. I eventually got to platform 7 just in time to see my train disappearing down the line.

And all that was on top of a power outage at the start of my journey. I was a little worried when I woke up to a couple of inches of snow, with it still falling, but my train left on time. I only got two stops down the line when we stopped. It took the driver quite some time to work that one out, trying to reboot his train from both ends before giving up. He announced the situation with good news and bad news. The good news was that there was nothing wrong with his train. Great. The bad news was that there was no power throughout the whole network. When it became obvious that we weren't going anywhere anytime soon (it would have turned out all day), I hooked up with a guy trying to get an Uber. That proved very difficult, with the roads snowed up, but after a lot of patience we found someone prepared to take us to Leeds station. I was already running two hours late when I eventually got a service to Birmingham, so missing that connection was particularly infuriating - to put it mildly. I suppose there's a business model at work here. By ensuring passengers miss their connections, they're encouraged to spend money on coffee and sandwiches to starve off hunger, and also books and magazines to relieve the boredom.

Getting back to today, although the service from Birmingham was on time, it was rather short on carriages, only having four, half as many as it should have had. It was standing room only. I shrewdly nabbed a first-class seat and upgraded myself. Those seats were soon all gone too. It continued to be on time (and crammed full) all the way to Sheffield and I thought I was going to be able to make a smart connection at Leeds back to Ilkley. Alas, it was not to be. We were stuck at Sheffield for half an hour, waiting for our change driver, who was on a late-running train. That points to the problem. There's absolutely no resilience in the system. The slightest thing goes wrong - which it always does - and there's a chain reaction. There's nothing or no one to take up any slack. Services are being run on a shoestring and passengers pay the price. When we eventually crawled into Leeds the train spilled quite a few passengers out, but about three times as many were soon trying to get on. Most failed, left having to wait for the next service. I was amazed at how good-natured everyone seemed. I suppose people just get used to it. 

Despite all the travel difficulties, there were no regrets about attending the Retro Games Show. It was just a pity I didn't have more time there.

Final thing. Arachne pointed me at the Fasteroute App as a brilliant vehicle for tracking trains and delays on the move. It must use the same APIs as the website I mentioned. Heaven help you if you're not technically savvy in this brave new world of automation and minimal human service. I can't help but feel that the generation just above mine is being rapidly disenfranchised.