Sean vs British Rail

So, as you all know, I’ve started a new job. All in all, I am enjoying the new experience. It’s really quite neat to go from somewhere like Morenci that had thousands of employees and took almost an hour to drive from one side to the other, to Stowmarket in which I already know almost every employees name and can walk across in about 5 minutes. But the one thing that I didn’t see coming was the epic battle that would become my life versus the National Rail.

First, let’s get something straight, I think that the UK national rail system is great. Maybe not the best in the world, but it makes an absolute mockery of anything I have ever seen in North America. There is no where that I have lived in which an hour and a half commute by train would be possible.  I mean, if I miss a train, that sucks, but it’s a half hour and then the next one will take me on my merry way. Even thought I work in a small English Village.

However, some of the things I’ve had to deal with are the most ridicules things that I have ever heard of. Let’s just go over this week. Monday, the whole of Britain was in a joyous mood as the weather hit the highest that it had hit in the entire year. At a toast 33 degrees Celsius (92 F, for the Americans in the crowd) , National rail had to cancel many trains as it was too hot. Wait, 33 is too hot?  This isn’t good, and summer has really just started.  Apparently all of Britain would shut down if it ever had to deal with a month of Arizona summer.  And to make things so much better, I spent the entire train ride next to a parent and their two children that were, A) Bored, therefore acting out and yelling, and B) because the kids were acting out, the parent kept yelling at them to stop embarrassing them.  At least, I had something to watch for three hours. Always stay positive. Next, apparently in the UK after a really hot day (hehe, that still makes me giggle thinking that 33 is a really hot day) there will be thunder storms. Ah, the UK is a country build on rain, I’m not too worried about it. Tuesday…. First the morning train is delayed due to recovering from the excessively hot day, then the night train home is slowed to a crawl due to flooding. Seriously? Flooding? In the UK? It rains here almost every day. Wednesday, we decided that weather was no longer a reason to have issues. Nope, it was going to be a train failure. Somewhere ahead of us a train had stopped moving and that meant that I got a lovely few of an empty field for a good long time. I mean, would it have been too much to ask for us to have been stopped so we could at least see some cows? I’m really not a hard person to please here or better yet somewhere with connectivity for my trusty Google phone? No, middle of an empty field…  That brings us to Thursday, better known as today, and I can proudly say, that as I sit here and write this, the train is chugging a long quite nicely. So here’s hoping nothing changes on that front.

This week hasn’t been the only case of National Rail trying to beat me. If you remember upon arrival the trains tried their best to get me lost somewhere in Northern England never to make it to Scotland. Then you had Rebecca’s fun getting stuck trying to get down from Scotland and then there is my personal favorite. Thankfully, I didn’t have to live through this one personally, but last fall the train ended up being  delayed and cancelled because of leaves. Yes, you read that correctly, leaves. But according to the railway if it had been just normal leaves things would have been fine, but these leaves were different and caused all sorts of issues. This now means I have a mission before fall, find out what tree leaves are these so called special ones, and burn down all those kinds of trees within a mile of my route home.

So, I would like to keep saying, I am still enjoying taking the train, but ugh. Sometimes these things are just… wait a second, message over the PA… shit, this is going to be an adventure…