The unreliability of trains

It’s honestly no wonder so few people use public transport, because it is shockingly unreliable. Sunday we were heading to Worcester as we’d got some of the cheap great escape tickets. It was the only day we could do and we just picked the place randomly. We couldn’t get a train out of our station before 10am which is shocking in itself. We figured we could cope with getting there at 12:30 even though it was later than we’d hoped. Arriving at the train station Sunday morning the train we wanted to catch was running 30 minutes late, meaning we’d miss our connection. I found another train that we could get which would get us in with six minutes to spare to change trains. But no that train decided it would be exactly six minutes late, so we pulled into the station as our train was pulling away on the next platform. We couldn’t get another train for an hour, and that train was leaving from a different station so we had to make the short walk there and hang around.

Coming home was much smoother, apart from the fact that the London midlands website gave us the time of a Virgin train for our connection. A train which we couldn’t get on with the ticket we had, so we had to hang around for an extra half an hour before getting a train.

So Sunday we spent nearly two hours in Birmingham, almost as much time as we’d managed to get in Worcester. This would be bad enough at the best of times, but with a double pushchair and two children one whom is a toddler who gets bored easily it turned into somewhat of a nightmare.

The weekend previous my parents, who I’d got some tickets for where planning a day out to Shrewsbury. They don’t get the chance to go out very often and were looking forward to it. Their train was cancelled and they were going to have long waits, and arrive really late. They aren’t very confident on trains so they ended up coming home and not getting to go. Losing out on they money they had spent on tickets.

I arrived home and swore never to use a train again, and I won’t be using one again soon. Late, cancelled, expensive and just dam unreliable.