At the risk of drawing a sneering response from the Rail Minister Tom Harris, I’d like to have a little moan about my train journey yesterday. I spent the Bank Holiday weekend up in the Lake District and seeing as it takes an absolute age to get down the West Coast line on a Sunday or a Bank Holiday, we decided to go for a walk in the Dales and then have me catch the train from Northallerton to London. The 18:36 from there was meant to get me into London at 21.10.
When I arrived at the station, though, I was told that the train on which I was booked and had a seat reserved on had been cancelled. Apparently, Grand Central had insufficient rolling stock to run the service which they’d be selling tickets for—the man at the station told me they were cancelling one in three trains. As I had a Grand Central ticket I couldn’t just take the next direct train to London. Instead, I had to take the train to York and once on that train I’d be issued a ticket to get me from York to London.
The problem with this scheme was that the York to London train they gave us tickets for was already—and unsurprisingly for a Bank Holiday—full. So if you had been booked on the train from North Allerton to London you had a snowball in hell’s chance of finding a seat.
All of us who had been let down by the incompetence of Grand Central spent the two and a bit hours journey to London trying to find a bit of a corridor to squat down in, which is hardly the kind of service that we’d paid for, and arrived at King Cross just over forty minutes late. I’m all for people travelling by rail, it is obviously greener than us all adding to the Bank Holiday traffic on the roads, but the actions of train companies like Grand Central make it a difficult and uncomfortable experience.
Image credit: David Ingham
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