Not a good morning

Warning: if you don't want a depressing read then skip this article.

It all started with a wet walk down to Ruislip (my normal station, Ruislip Manor, being closed with rebuilding). They told us there were delays on the Metropolitan. So my usual Piccadilly (which did come in time, the only thing to go right today) was overcrowded by the time we had reached Sudbury Town just 5 stops on.

Stopped outside Acton Town. After ten minutes or so the driver told us that we were being held because there was a faulty District Line train blocking our route. We move off and as we leave Acton the driver tells us we are making a stop at Turnham Green. Doesn't say why. We stop there. A long wait. A couple of District Line's come in alongside and go. Then we are told there is a security alert at Hammersmith and no Piccadilly's are running.

Oh well never mind, here is another city-bound District line. So we all change. It gets one stop down the line and stops at Stamford Brook and now we are told that no trains are running through Hammersmith.

So a long wet walk to find a bus. We crawl (slower than walking) into Hammersmith where the northern entrance (but not the exit) to the bus station is closed by police, and indeed the tube is also shut and ringed by police. So we drive around to the southern entrance and a few moments leave by the northern exit. No idea why the entrance was shut, obviously not on safety concerns or they should not have allowed the bus into the station at all.

At last I debark from the bus, at 10:10 and reach my office after a journey of 1 hour and 50 minutes to go about 12 miles.

There, I told you not to read it.

Hail ! The Spring (and delays)

After a cold and dreary few weeks the weather is warming up again. This week should really feel like the first week of spring as temperatures climb towards 12c or so. So what better way to start the week than with a serious delay and juicy lie.

The delay hit me this morning. Five minutes after boarding my train we stopped near Rayners Lane and stayed there. For thirty minutes. "Points failure at Rayners Lane", we were told and although I usually very sceptical about the bog-standard Tube excuses, I think this one might have got it right.

The lie was on Transport for London's website. They posted a notice saying that no trains were running between Uxbridge and South Harrow, effective 8:52am. But my train finally left Rayners Lane for South Harrow at 9:15.

So hey ho for the joys of spring and another refund claim.

A touch of the chills

Cold isn't it? Well, not really, temperatures around 0c first thing in the morning and rising to 4 or 5 by afternoon may be uncomfortable but we've had worse. In fact this will be probably be one of the milder winters of recent years. But that won't stop London Underground. Today's excuse for severe delays on Piccadilly and District this morning? - overrunning engineering works. So if it's the right kind of snow for a change then they get you some other way.

Actually I wasn't late today. Soon after I reached the station, a Piccadilly came in. But it filled up to the gunnells (that word looks odd but it sounds right. Gun-holes I suppose, in the original) at South Harrow and was jammed tight thereafter.

And in other news, broadband has been installed in the Ramblings household. So these despatches can now be easily created at night rather than at work as has been the case up till now. Wonder if that will change the essential, how shall I put it, ethos of the site? We shall find out....

Pether Returns!

I don't know if you are familiar with the Monty Python episode entitled "The Cycling Tour". Unlike all their other shows, this was one continuous story featuring Mr. Pether. Whilst on a cycling tour of the West Country he falls off his bike several times, meets a man who markets self-ejecting tomatos, has curious encounters with Chinese diplomats in the British Consulate in Smolensk and ends up facing a firing squad in a Russian prison. Throughout his travails, Pether, (played by Michael Palin in his finest nerdy, round-glasses and bobble hat mode) is always cheerful and positive no matter how much surface impaction his crunchie bar may suffer.

This morning I was amused to find the only ticket-operated gate leading into Ruislip Station blocked by a gentleman frantically pulling at an obstruction. It was his bicycle. He could not push it past the gates. He could not pull it back. The alarm was ringing but none of the station staff could be bothered to attend. People used the emergency gate to reach the platform while Pether huffed and puffed, and pulled and pushed.

My amusement did not last very long. There were no Piccadilly trains ("signal failure at Arnos Grove" got its regular airing) so I came to work the long way round via Baker Street and was half an hour late. I wonder how Mr Pether got on.

Imagining the past

One hundred years ago the Metropolitan railway began running through to Uxbridge. Commuting into London from the hitherto isolated villages of Ruislip, Pinner and Eastcote began. It is hard to imagine what my predecessors might have experienced. Waiting for a through connection on a dark evening at Rayners Lane, one has to wish away the surrounding houses and the lights, envisage ploughed fields stretching away on either side of the railway and hear the clank of the locomotives working in the goods yards at the side of the station. There must have been piles of coal used by householders and the railway alike, perhaps freight wagons standing idle overnight, railway workers holding lanterns checking the track or doing maintenance. The 1930s Art Deco station vanishes, replaced by a simple square brick booking office perched alone on the bridge over the railway. All the buildings on the skyline vanish - perhaps a couple of cottages in the distance with smoke rising from the chimneys and lights glowing behind the curtains. And the sounds - no cars, very few people - imagine horses whinnying as they were led back to their stables, dogs barking across the fields, birds roosting in the trees and hedges. This must have been a very dark world after sunset. The station lights (Gas lamps?) would have provided the traveller with some comfort and would have made the surrounding fields seem even darker and remote. Rural Middlesex was reaching the end of its long life, the fields were being sold to builders, the plots marked out, the great wave of incomers were on their way. Fifty years later my parents were to join them.

I would dearly love to wander through that green and quiet landscape of the near past. Traces remain, including the parks and open land that runs along much of the railway today, making it possible to imagine the rest. But those days when the railway was the lifeline, and the horse and cart (and the bicycle) the only alternatives, ah, those days we shall see no more. At least not until the oil runs out.