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Tag: waterloo
Today contained what must be the most annoying piece of not-irony-but-what-most-peole-call-irony ever.
Long story short, someone who was giving a presentation had decided to bring his own equipment instead of paying to hire ours, and failed to bring a long enough extension cable. He came down to our office and announced that he was from Network Rail and he needed our help. After a bit of pleading, I told him we’d help him out this time, but if my train was late today I’d charge him double.
I think he now owes me quite a bit of money.
I got to Waterloo on my way home to fond only a handful of trains were on the departure boards, and all of them were already late. Figuring the earlier train might be the first to depart, I jumped on the 16:05 train, which at that point was already 45 minutes late in leaving.
Almost 30 minutes later, the guard finally turned up, had a quick look, and then let us know that there the driver hadn’t turned up yet so we weren’t going anywhere.
I got off the train to find the departure board had changed the train from being the 16:05 to being the 16:50 – and interesting choice, as that meant the train was still half an hour late. Why not change the time to make it a train that wasn’t supposed to have left yet?
At that point I gave up, met up with my wife (who leaves work after me) and headed for the Tube, and a journey that ended up taking over an hour to get as far as Richmond, where our final leg – a bus journey – was hampered by such bad traffic we decided it would be better to eat out that evening.
Even after we’d finished, the traffic was bad enough that we decided it would be better to walk to Twickenham Station to pick up our bikes and cycle home.
So, what caused this massive, widespread disruption?
As it turned out, it was caused by a single fatality, at Surbiton, at 10am that morning. Somehow, a single fatality at that spot, on a completely different line to the one I was using, caused total and complete havoc on the entirety of the South West Trains network, by causing both staff and trains to be stuck out of position.
Makes you wonder if they somehow knew that was a weak spot in the system.
Oh yes, and if you’re wondering, we did make it home – a total of over three hours after I left work, if you include stopping for dinner.
Now look.
Describing something as an “incident at Waterloo Station” does not do enough to satisfy my curiosity. Especially when it involves a fire engine outside the station and an ambulance parked in front of the ticket barriers. That’s interesting; I want to know what’s going on.
I first thought, maybe it’s something as trivial as someone getting trapped in one of the on-board toilets. As I have now discovered it was actually someone under a train, which obviously is a terrible thing.
This seems to happen to me a lot. A while back I was attempting to contact the Apple Store in the Bentall Centre in Kingston to chase up a repair and the hold message changed to ‘due to unforeseen circumstances this store is closed’. I wondered what the heck it was, maybe a bomb threat or something. It later emerged it was a woman who had tragically fallen from the top floor.
The reason why people crowd around accidents (or ‘incidents’) is because they want to see what’s going on. Most people are inherently nosy. That’s the inquisitive nature that got humanity so far… until it turned into the desire to hear celeb gossip, and now we’re mostly fucked.
There might have been a point to this post, but if there was it has temporarily escaped me.
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