What fun it is to try to visit people using only public transport and wishing to travel on a Sunday. I wanted to pop down to Kent today to see my brother and his family. My dad and sister were also there.
Yesterday I went on the National Rail website to try to use their journey planner. This wasn’t just to check out train times, but also in the full knowledge that there are always engineering works going on at the weekend, I wanted to check train times and possible diversions.
The website was down. And, as I type this the following day, it still is. Well, it is if you want to use Firefox, a browser that it’s been perfectly happy to accept before. Yesterday it threw me a googly by pretending that it was all something to do with my browser not accepting cookies, which it does.
Similarly, The Trainline was also down. And it seill seems to be now.
So I tried the National Rail Enquiries helpline, which has evidently outsourced its operation to India. Still they were helpful, but the two potential routes I put to them involved several changes and a bus ride. Incidentally, if you visit Say No To 0870 they can give you “local” numbers that avoid 0845 7 numbers which are chargeable on my mobile phone and aren’t part of my inclusive minutes.
I spoke to my brother who suggested another nearby station. This time I visited South Eastern Rail’s website and perused their timetables. Then I spotted a special timetable that accounted for engineering that was taking place until next weekend.
Aha! So that’ll supercede the normal timetable. I found a train departing at 9.46am from Charing Cross. Naturally my local line in this part of north London was also experiencing engineering works, but a bus, train and a couple of tubes later I was walking out onto the concourse of Charing Cross station. It was 9.31, leaving me enough time to buy a ticket and a newspaper.
Except for one small thing. All the trains were starting at Victoria today, a helpful sign told me. 15 minutes to Victoria or an hour’s wait! No time for the tube, so an £8 taxi later, I was in Victoria where the 9.46 had changed into a 9.50 train but I jumped on.
I got there of course, and it’s true that I “faredodged” because I didn’t get a chance to buy a ticket. Well, I only wanted a ticket from the boundary of Zone 5 and they can’t do them on trains. But an annual season ticket was enough to impress guards in both directions who failed to spot that it didn’t allow me to take this route. But the cost of the journey to me would have been around the same as that taxi fare, so I don’t feel too bad about it all. Don’t you love public transport? (Still, here’s a nice story about travelling to the Arctic Cicrle by train).