Thread by @_Sobieski

Bit tired today. Maybe because I got home at 840am this morning after starting my Coventry-Glasgow train journey on @AvantiWestCoast *last night* at 1836. Scheduled arrival at 2317...but....a sorry tale of the exhaustion of British infrastructure developed >🧵

A preface: the real time tweets of frustration and incredulity at last night's gathering farce are on my timeline. But: this *is* my timeline now. It chronicles the recent woes of a regular West Coast Mainline user. And these woes have of late been especially woeful. /

Weeks of late and cancelled trains, multiple incidents, endless delay repay announcements all merge into one sorry mess of a train company, and its grappling with fragmented infrastructures and the general end-stage disasters of privatisation rolling across the UK right now. >

Here's *one week* of text message alerts, from last week, for an example..... >

Anyway, yesterday. The train schedules were shocked across the line as we have yet another 'Trespassers on the railway' incident. (Google News this and be shocked at the amount of such incidents across the UK). I assume the worst (my starting position now as a regular commuter).>

/ So I get to COV station early, to find - amazingly - that my train *is* running from London. And it's only ten minutes late (yay!). BUT. It's getting cancelled at Preston. (That is not Glasgow). I ask one of the staff at COV and he says it was to 'do with drivers or sthin' >

(Last week, a person hit by a train caused more cancellations - in conjunction with the gathering Storm Babet - my train was rammed and crazy like an AI merger of Bosch-Escher) /

/ Anyway, it comes, is packed, and gets to Preston, with much apologies from the manager. We all roll off, about 200 of us at Preston to await the last one of the night, scheduled for 2143 (so 50 mins later). A university ladies hockey team is there. Families. Tourists. Me. /

It's cold. The Waiting Room is packed. Two poor homeless guys charge a phone in it, staring at everyone else. The station wifi is bust. We wait. The train arrives at 2235 or so. So, now we are pretty late: 90 mins or so. But by recent standards it'll do. And it's a train. >

It goes. The guard apologises, we have to make extra stops. A dog on the concourse wags its tail furiously at a young guy getting off a train at Oxenholme. We get through Carlisle, we're going to be about 2 hours late. But - at least we're getting there. We reach Lockerbie..../

/ And the train grinds to a halt. My stomach churns. I know what's coming. I am a West Coast Veteran. The dreaded BINGBONG and the words "Freight Train...Stopped....Beattock...more when I have it" strike cold ice into my Zombified Avanti Heart. /

TLDR: we are there for 2.5 hours, through increasingly mournful and desperate apologies. Then, the announcement that puts us out of our misery, at about 240 am. Freight train is dead. Line Blocked. We're going *back* to Carlisle. /

We are then told: you've a choice "we can get you a hotel or you can take a taxi. We've ordered them." A lovely lady from the shop (all the staff, btw on @AvantiWestCoast were *superb*, they must be going through shit in this job rn) comes along and asks what we want to do... /

I went for the hotel. I imagined a 3 star, sorta tired, but clean. Maybe some poached eggs in the morning from cheery staff before my early train back on the unblocked line......we arrive at Carlisle at 340 or so....

There was no Hotel. There were no Taxis. /

There was low grade confusion, what I can only really call British Exhaustion Chaos, where the poor station staff had to tell everyone what they'd been promised was news to them (they were also excellent). Most folk on the platform couldn't hear a thing. /

Taxis would take an age, we were told. They had to come from Glasgow and then head off to various places - Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr. (Not new - see the recent viral thread on here by @JamesNokise for a comparison.) A few weeks ago, I got a taxi from Preston costing £175. /

The *nice* thing is, I meet some *lovely* people - Geraldine from Glasgow, who lives near me. Rod from Derby, who is going for a meeting in Glasgow in 4 hours and decides just to take the 1st train back to Derby instead. We sit in 1st class on the now defunct train. And blether /

until the taxis turn up - we are told it will take an hour. Geraldine is "shocked" that this is a common experience. We talk about our jobs, Scottish mountains, children and phones, timetables, how tired we all are of this shit. /

/ It gets to 430 am. The nice lady from the shop gives us all cups of tea. I ask - ironically - when we burst out the Vera Lynn songs. It then gets to 5am. FIVE AM IN THE MORNING! We are told there's a couple of seats in a cab that will take 1 hr 45 to hit Glasgow..../

Rod heads off to NotGlasgow. He videos the time on the platform clock for evidence for his Boss. (Bye, Rod, you were a nice bloke, a pint later in another life.) We decide to just wait and take the first train of the morning. /

/ In the Carlisle waiting room, the first morning commuters arrive. There are four of us left. At 651 am, more than *twelve hours* after I arrived at Cov the night before, I board the @TPExpressTrains service to GLC. I fall asleep. A large dog gets on at Carstairs. /

I get to GLC with my new pal Geraldine at 0821, we share a cab. I get dropped off and she goes off to hug her children before they head out to school. She remains flabbergasted that "this happens a lot and you have ot suffer it." This is, sadly, true /

What do we have to do to fix this? As we know, the issues are deep and long. They exist north of Watford. @AndyBurnhamGM has been an excellent campaigner for the North's disastrous connectivity. /

/Last year the connection from Scotland was so completely fractured and unreliable that people (including me) went to get (way cheaper and more reliable) flights to LON and BHX instead. This is environmentally disastrous, as we know. But instead of a fix we get 'Net Zero Woke' /

/and, jaw droppingly @AvantiWestCoast were recently awarded a *nine year* extension to their contract. Since then the amount of incidents and cancellations seems to have accelerated and we now hear they are reducing services in Dec / So, what DO WE DO?
theguardian.com/business/2023/…

@AvantiWestCoast Well, you can write to your MPs. I have found @alisonthewliss a truly excellent and determined help here. I feel represented and advocated for. But you can also be aware, circulate it on here and in media, like @Glasgow_Times @heraldscotland @BBCScotlandNews @STVNews

DEMAND A BETTER RAILWAY. Reject continuity petroculture. Write to the Rail Ombudsman, find out more. I had a great learning exercise just by listening to the train driver @lateturn on here during the farrago last night...it's more complicated than we assume, but a fix is possible