Recently, thanks to a kerfuffle relating to a car being serviced under warranty at a garage that was nowhere near where we live, I needed to get back home from Maidenhead by public transport.
Getting to our house from anywhere by public transport is difficult, but even given our limited options, no effort has ever been made to link our home with Maidenhead. So getting home meant two buses and four trains and would take a minimum of two hours and 40 minutes, and even that journey time was only possible a few times a day.
The last couple of weeks have been both busy and stressful, so I will admit I was not in the optimum frame of mind for a difficult journey, and may have been distracted when a little concentration would help. But even given that excuse I managed to screw this up to a degree I would scarcely have believed possible.
This is the story of my #trainsaga.
Maidenhead
I decided to give myself a head start with a taxi to Maidenhead station, eliminating a 20 minute wait for a bus and a tour of the Maidenhead suburbs. Feeling pleased that I was ahead of the game, I then stood in the ticket office while I bought a ticket on my phone. It offered me two options, one of which was a split ticket that would save me 50p. I spend enough on the trains so I’m happy with even a modest discount. Yeah, OK, let’s split this bad boy.
Train 1 took me to Reading and was great. A non-stop trip to a big station with nice clean toilets, of which I availed myself. I then headed to the platform for train 2, a blue train which wasn’t due to leave for another 20 minutes. My journey planner said I should then get off that and wait on the platform further down the line for train 3, a green train which would take me somewhere I could find train 4.
Reading
On the opposite platform was a green train that was heading down the same line as train 2, and it left ten minutes sooner. I could do away with all this train 2 nonsense and just get the green train from here, presumably getting me to train 4 sooner. Maybe I could get home quicker than planned. I got on. The doors closed and we set off.
I then looked at where green train was stopping, and it was not stopping at the improbably named Winnersh Triangle. My split ticket was split there, and split tickets are only valid if the train actually calls at the station, because you must be able to at least theoretically get off at the end of one ticket and back on for the second. I didn’t have a valid ticket for this train, which is why my journey planner didn’t tell me to get on it, and now I was stuck and the guard was coming down the carriage.
Wokingham
So I quickly bought another ticket from Reading to Wokingham, which was the first stop on green train, costing £4.50. This eliminated my split ticket saving nine times over. It also meant I had to get off the green train at Wokingham because it wasn’t stopping at the place I was meant to get off train 3. Turns out both blue and green trains on this line only stop at some stations, and not the same stations every time, but different ones in different hours, so to make my split ticket work and to make the connections I needed only the specific trains in my journey planner would have got me there. But that’s OK, train 3 would stop at Wokingham. I just needed to wait there.
At Wokingham I sat on the platform for 20 minutes, and was able to tinker with something on my laptop which passed the time. Then the blue train arrived, and I was a bit distracted, so I got on it, and the doors closed, and only then did I realise that Winnersh Triangle is before Wokingham, so if I’d followed the plan I would have got off blue train before this point. I didn’t need blue train any more. I needed train 3, green train, but it was too late now. Blue train set off, went down a different line and deposited me in Bracknell.
I did not want to be in Bracknell. In fact, I think I can safely say I have never in my life wanted to be in Bracknell.
Bracknell
I crossed the bridge to head back. The next train back to Wokingham was 30 minutes away. I then remembered I hadn’t had any lunch, but I couldn’t leave the station, so I bought a bag of Doritos from a vending machine for £2.75.
Another blue train eventually came and took me on a seven minute, one stop journey back to Wokingham, where I crossed the bridge and sat down in the same seat I had mistakenly vacated 44 minutes previously.
Wokingham again
At this stage I consulted my journey planner all over again and was reminded of the fact that the journey I wanted to make was only possible in as few as four trains, and as little as two hours 40 minutes, a few times a day, and by detouring to Bracknell I had missed the green train I needed by some 35 minutes. So I made a new plan, which was going to take longer, but was the best available, and waited 25 minutes for the next green train.
Green train arrived, and I checked carefully the destination, the list of stations shown on the screen and the journey planner on my phone three or four times before boarding.
Green train took me to North Camp, which was only two stops away.
North Camp
There is nothing at North Camp station. It is not a place anyone travels for fun. It is marooned on the edge of a gloomy industrial estate, and separated from the place called North Camp by a dual carriageway, not that North Camp itself is a place you would wish on anyone you cared for. And yet here I was, embarking on a 15 minute walk to another station nearby on a different line. The only interchange betweem them is to walk through a car park and an industrial estate, because the lines don’t meet, share services or have stations where they cross.
My walk brought me to Ash Vale, which sees North Camp’s windswept platforms with views of highway embankments and scrap dealers, and brings to the party a long climb up a fully enclosed concrete staircase lit by fluorescent strips, smelling strongly of damp and reminiscent only of a nuclear bunker.
Ash Vale
Half way up the steps at Ash Vale I came to a sort of sad windowless concrete chamber where you could choose to go up different steps for different platforms, and a departure screen showed that a train that would take me home was departing that same minute, which would save me a twenty minute wait.
I ran up the remaining steps just in time to see the back end of the train leaving the platform, and spent the next twenty minutes sitting on the platform. A blue train then turned up and took me the remaining fifteen minutes down the line to Farnham.
Farnham
At Farnham, it becomes immediately clear that the people who run the trains don’t talk to the people who run the buses, and the people who run the buses think anyone who catches a train is a dick.
The train I had arrived on had come from central London. It had eight carriages and lots of people got off at Farnham even though this was just the middle of the afternoon. I joined a fair few of them in crossing the forecourt to bus stop M, where an inspection of the timetable, and my phone’s journey planner, confirmed the news that the half hourly bus home has been carefully timed to depart two minutes before the half hourly train from London arrives, every half hour all day long, thus ensuring that anyone wishing to travel onward from Farnham has a 28 minute wait.
Thankfully, at this point, the clouds parted and fortune finally smiled upon me. The bus I had missed was running twenty minutes late, so after just eighteen minutes at the bus stop I got on board and went home.
Epilogue
This has been a long and detailed account of one of the most dispiriting afternoons I’ve had in recent memory. It was dispiriting partly because all of this is terrible, I suppose, but it’s mostly dispiriting because I didn’t think I was capable of this degree of ineptitude or stupidity.
I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t read the whole thing. I think I just needed to get it out of my system. If it helps, I would summarise the experience thus:
- This whole thing was awful;
- I am an idiot;
- We’ve got the car back now so I don’t have to do this ever again.
Thank you.