Trains again

I’m sorry to have to post yet again about Virgin Trains, but last night’s journey was spectacular for one reason. For the first time ever, I was on a train where the driver went the wrong way.

Birmingham New Street station is (like most stations) a straight-through job. Reading can be weird, because you do reverse your journey if you’re going on from there – which is always amusing in itself, watching idiots panic as the train pulls away going in the direction it just came from. But I digree. BNS is a straight-through station.

So it was a bit disconcerting to pull away from it last night going in the direction we’d come in from. Leamington Spa – Birmingham New Street – Wolverhampton does not involve going back towards Coventry. Well, unless you’re the driver we had last night.

It took them about 10-15 minutes to realise too. So we ended up seeing BNS twice. I’d seen Stockport three fucking times on the way down, although that was supposedly intentional. This one was just a cock-up.

Quite scary too, really. You’d think someone would have figured it out – not just the driver, but also the signalling staff. And what would’ve happened if another train had been coming towards us as we “left” BNS? The mind boggles.

Harridan

Do you ever have those days where it feels like all you’re doing is nagging and chasing people up in order to get them to do the stuff they’d actually promised to do already? That’s what my day is like today.

I’ve had to chase up the contractors who are supposed to be checking a couple of useful things in the house, (like gas supply, and making sure that the waste pipe in the bathroom isn’t utterly chuffed, and just needs to be repaired/replaced at the joint) another plumber for a quote that he should’ve done three weeks ago, the bank regarding a double-charge that stuck me over the overdraft limit (In a surreal moment they stopped a £10 direct debit that would’ve made me overdrawn, and then – um – charged me £30 for doing so, thus sending me £20 more overdrawn than the original direct debit would have done. I absolutely loathe banks.) and a couple of other minor chuff-ups (including still sending certain bits of post to the address I haven’t lived in for a year), British Gas to ensure that the engineer who’s supposed to be coming tomorrow is actually going to do so, and finally BT to check why they’ve suddenly decided I’m on paperless e-billing when I’ve always told them I don’t want that because they’re inefficient as shit anyway and I prefer to check what they’ve screwed up.

In fact, the only pearl today so far is Photobox who’ve yet again managed to receive my order by 10am and send it out by 11am. Isn’t it sad when you’re actually impressed that someone/anyone can simply provide the service that they say they can?

Paralympics

I’ve been really pleased this year to see the BBC showing the Paralympics as well as the standard Olympics. It’s been avoided like the plague for so many years, and finally they seem to be doing the right thing.

Even better, according to the Guardian (You may need free registration to see the page, I’m not sure) it’s pulling in 2 million viewers, 12% of the available audience at the time. Superb stuff.

Still Up It

And yes, four days on, and Blogrolling is still well and truly chuffed. What a joy. I’m really glad I don’t pay for the service, or I’d be even more irritated.

Mileage

I’ve been trying to avoid this set of maths and thoughts, but while sitting on this train I’ve been thinking a bit about the mileage I’ve covered this month. For once I’m going to start with the 12ish mile daily round-trip to work, which amounts to a juicy 240ish miles a month on its own. By the time September comes to a close, I’ll have been to Reading twice, Oxford once, Stanstead once, and a small matter of a trip to Iceland. It’s about a 400-mile round trip to Reading, and not much under that for Oxford when you include the travelling to the parental home. So that’s 1200 miles, and a total of approximately 1500. Oxford to Stanstead is about 100 miles (total : 1700 miles), and Reykjavik is roughly 1100 miles from Stanstead. So all told, that’s just under 4000 miles.

Come the start of 2005, once I’ve moved myself to the Reading area, it’s going to be a massive reduction in my mileage, and probably a corresponding one in my stress levels. In truth, the train service is stressing me out less as I’m a) travelling on it more (again, there’s a logic there, but I’ll be damned if I can find it) and b) knowing that whatever the torture, it’s finite – three months, and I’m done on the huge mileages for a while. Even should I end up commuting to London for a couple of months (and I do hope I don’t have to do that, but I will if I have to) it’ll amount to less mileage. Of course, the Iceland trip skewed the mileage a bit for this month, but it’s still pretty heavy going even without that.

Logical

I swear I’ll never figure out the “logic” on which Virgin Trains runs their service. In fairness the journey on Friday was only cocked up by problems outside Virgin’s control – some fuckwit decided to drive into a bridge that the train tracks went over. So they had to get the bridge checked before sending a train over the bridge. Not much they can do about that – and because it was going to take so long, they decided to re-route the train instead. 75 minutes late in the end, but what the hell, it arrived, and there really wasn’t a lot Virgin could do about it.

Tonight though, it’s (yet again) the 1805 from Reading to Manchester. 6pm on a Sunday – there’s likely to be one or two people on that one, aren’t there? So I know, why don’t we just put four carriages on? That’ll make life so much easier instead of the eight carriages that we have at stupid times like 6am or 9pm. Peak time? Lets ram ’em in like sardines.

I simply don’t understand the logistics of that. Maybe it’s just me, and there really is some great piece of logic at work. Personally, I think it’s just a big cosmic joke, except no-one’s told us the punchline yet.

Up It

On the face of current evidence (i.e. I find it impossible to believe no-one’s updating) it looks like good old Blogrolling is currently well and truly up it.