Sometimes a minute can make all the difference

[williamjm]

On Friday I took the train up from Cambridge to Scotland. The journey went fairly smoothly at first but unfortunately the train up from Peterborough to Edinburgh was delayed by 16 minutes, which under normal circumstances wouldn't be too unreasonable a delay for a 300 mile journey but when the gap between my predicted arrival at Edinburgh and when I should have caught the train up to here was also precisely 16 minutes. To taunt me even more the train schedulers had decided to put the train I should have caught on the opposite side of the platform to the one the train I arrived on so that I could easily have got over to the other side of the platform and even touched the train but could not have got on it because the doors being locked on the other train seemed to be precisely timed to coincide with the doors unlocking on my train. On its own this would not have been that bad, and I looked at the timetable and thought I'd probably just get on the 16:33 train instead (this was about half past three). Unfortunately about 20 minutes before it was scheduled to depart the departure change was suddenly changed to 18:16, naturally there was no explanation at first although eventually it was explained that they had to put a new engine in the train which is probably quite a good reason for a delay. I attempted to get on the 17:40 train which stopped at the same stations but was informed that because this was a Scotrail service rather than a National Express service my ticket was not valid. For a while they were going to put us on a bus instead, but then decided that taking into account the time it would take the bus to get out of Edinburgh during Friday rush hour it would be faster to wait for the train to be fixed. Therefore I spent quite a bit of time wandering round Waverley station, if it hadn't been raining heavily outside I might have been able to wander round Edinburgh a bit but I stayed mostly inside although I did also go round the neighbouring Princes Mall and discovered that since I lived in Edinburgh it has changed from a shopping centre with a large selection of rubbish shops into a shopping centre with a small selection of rubbish shops and a lot of empty stores. Eventually at 18:20 the train finally left and I got here about half past 8 only 11 hours after I originally left my flat in Cambridge. I know a three-hour delay is fairly minor in the scale of transportation problems but it was particularly galling since it could all have been avoided if the first train had just got into Waverley a minute earlier.

Today was a more relaxing day. My uncle and aunt came up to visit, as he always does my uncle insisted on us going for a walk - fortunately there was no repeat of the time he took us out for a supposedly short walk and we ended up climbing a reasonably large and steep hill on a very hot day without having anything to drink (this happened about 15 years ago but apparently none of us have forgotten). Despite the forecast of 'heavy rain' and the rest of Britain apparently having turned into New Atlantis it was actually sunny and dry all day here.