I will now tell you a story that has stuck in my mind. I was on a train to Newcastle about two or three years ago now, I was in my late teens and already by that point trains were comfortable. For those of my readers who don't know England, or who have never been north of Manchester or York, there aren't many stops down the North-East Coast. They usually begin in Aberdeen and end at London but the stops are few because there aren't really any major cities on the East Coast of England. There is only one stop between Edinburgh and Newcastle, sometimes there isn't any, and that is the lovely town of Berwick-Upon-Tweed, a place I go to annually. It's roughly 40 minutes away from Edinburgh and probably the same, if not less, from Newcastle. Edinburgh is a big station, and I mean big, I avoid changing there because it's just so vast and the platforms are every which way to Narnia; go up the stairs, hop on your right foot, click your tongue and roll down a ramp, there you are at platform 11. On this journey to Newcastle we stopped at Edinburgh, from Glasgow anyway, and we sat there for about 10 minutes. People get on, you watch them look around awed trying to find their seats and hope no one takes the empty one next to you. We pull away from the platform after 10 minutes is up and this girl suddenly gets up and runs for the doors. Turns out she's got on the wrong train, the next stop isn't for another 40 minutes until Berwick-Upon-Tweed. I have told people about this girl for years, wondering how she managed it.
Folks, I no longer wonder.
I've been having a bad week, we all know what University stress is like, and so when I booked to see Love Labour's Won in Stratford-upon-Avon, I thought it would set this week up to be good. The play was good, the fact I couldn't sleep at night was not. I've been to Stratford many, many times, you have to change at Birmingham, the same for Glasgow, the same for Leicester. I've only ever changed at Birmingham for Leicester once in the summer, it was quiet, the terminating station was Leicester, it was all plain and simple. The platforms at New Street are not. They have the evil letter subscripts, like 9a, 10b, etc. The train I was booked on terminated at Stansted Airport, via Leicester, and was leaving from platform 9a, Crosscountry service, The train I got on was a crosscountry, although not one like I'd ever seen before, and stopped at my platform.
I think you know where I'm going with this.
It turns out where I was standing was very near the border between 9a and 9b. The train I actually got on was for Plymouth. The next stop, I was to find out too late, was Cheltenham, 50 minutes away. I cannot tell you how much of a bullet I dodged on this trip. There was another guy, slightly older than me, who was not so lucky and had done the exact same thing as I had. He had a flight to catch at Stansted, one he could now potentially miss.
Anyone could freak out, be worried, but thanks to my experience in travelling I honestly wasn't worried, probably the only thing I haven't been worried about for a few weeks. All you do is get off at the next stop, which unfortunately for me was so far away, and then hop on the next train back to Birmingham. I did have a booked seat on the Crosscountry to Leicester, but it was an open return ticket, meaning I could use it once at any time between now and the 14th January 2015.
I got talking to the Spanish PhD student from Birmingham who had made the exact same mistake as I had. I thought it funny how two possible future academics can be so clueless about transport. After all of these years of travelling, I make a rookie mistake. The only thing I've done on trains that came close was getting an express train to an area of Glasgow with a bad rep by accident, but that was only 10 minutes away by train anyway. Cheltenham was a whole other city!
 |
| The ironic thing in this pic is that I actually went down past Stratford-Upon-Avon where I had set off from. |
Spanish dude, I hope you caught that flight.
The reason for this post, well reasons, were that:
1. Always, always, always, check the train you're on. It says on the front of the train, sometimes, but not always, it's kind enough to say it inside the carriage (not for me, of course).
2. To give everyone a laugh at my mistake
When I did eventually get back to Birmingham I got the 2 hour later train to Leicester from the same platform, and one of the platform attendants recognised me and had a good ol' laugh at what had happened to me. I must admit I wasn't in the best of moods for this to happen to me this week, if it was any other, less stressful, time of the year I would have laughed, and now I'm sitting in my flat at Leicester, I find it does have some mirth, and it will certainly make my friends laugh when I get home for Christmas.
Warning folks, always check your train, or you may find yourself seeing the inside of another city's train station, rather than the city itself. Has anyone else done the same thing as I? Did you get on an express train that didn't stop at all from one point to anther, 2+ hours away?
