Most embarrassing transport story while travelling?

[enginedin]

I'm posting this for a bit of catharsis and hoping others have got equally embarrassing tales (to make me feel a bit better about myself!)

I was travelling, for work, to a European country whose language I was relatively unfamiliar with. I'd been told what bus to get from the airport (and I'd bought the tickets in advance) for a relatively long distance journey - kind of an equivalent of National Express (there was no easy train journey to the town I was travelling to). It's early-mid evening. I got on the bus - the bus destination board had the name of the town I was going to (and nothing else). 2.5-ish hours later, we stop in the town I'm going to. From where I was sitting, I could see the text on the bus stop, and it didn't match the name of the bus stop I'd been told to get off at. Given the destination board was this town - I thought I should stay on, and it obviously makes two stops here. However, it doesn't... we went back on the motorway. The next stop was the next town, 35 miles later. The coach driver spoke just enough english (helped by a bilingual passenger) to tell me there was another bus in 3 hours I could get back. So, I found some food, waited around, and got the bus back - finally getting back to the bus stop I should have got off at initially at ~0245. The most guilt-ridden part for me was the person I'd travelled to this town to meet knew the hotel was ~3 km from the bus stop, so he got back up to come and give me a lift to my hotel, despite also needing to be up much earlier than me the next morning (I obviously did leave him a gift before I left at the end of the week!)

(I've obviously pseudo-anonymised this to some extent, although if anyone at work who reads these forums recognises the story, well, I've just outed myself!!)

I hope it's ok to have added it in the Trips Report section - it is a form of report after all! No doubt there are some standard stories of having fallen asleep etc, but let's see what else people will admit to

 

[Peter Mugridge]

In the late 1980s, it was still generally possible for anyone to request a reasonable hold if they had tight connections - and it is probably no coincidence that this was abolished not long after a particularly spectacular and incompetent screw up.

An evening passenger from Farnham one Saturday noted that there was a possible double connection, but that each was particularly tight and that missing either would add about half an hour to the journey, which was to an intermediate station between Raynes Park and Epsom. Faced with this potential hour of delay, a request was made at Farnham that the connections at both Surbiton and Raynes Park should be guaranteed, and this was agreed.

Upon approaching Surbiton, the train ground to a halt and the passenger, looking out, could see a red signal ahead and that another train was occupying the up fast platform. Five minutes later, no slow train had come past and the other train was still blocking the platform ahead. Then there was an announcement about a points failure at Surbiton, and realisation slowly dawned that the train ahead was the one that was supposed to be in the up slow platform and was being held...

The passenger then went along the train to find the guard and explained why the train in front was not moving - the guard then contacted the driver, who was then seen climbing down and using the signal post telephone, a couple of minutes later the train in front moved off and the passenger was finally on the platform, now some 20 minutes late, waiting for the next stopping service.

This the passenger duly boarded and after switching back to the up slow it deposited him at Raynes Park, expecting to have another long wait.

It then became obvious that all the down slow services were late as well. Apparently nothing had come through for about half an hour.

What transpired was that British Rail had indeed held the second connection as well... but at Wimbledon, not Raynes Park. Nobody had thought to release it either after the earlier error at Surbiton ( of holding a service for the one stuck behind it ) had become apparent, nor to check what exactly was going on - which should have been done within minutes.





Umm.... guess who the passenger was...?

When a hold instruction goes wrong, it can go really very wrong.

This was in the days when the Farnham and Basingstoke services still split and joined at Woking, so not only did they now have a whole half hour segment of the suburban services running with delays of between 5 and 40 minutes, they also had a late running batch of inbound fast line services with delays of 5 to 25 minutes, one of which - with the heavier end of the delays - would need to split when going back out to serve two different destinations and then rejoin to different inbound units on their way back again. The entire South West Division timetable would have been disrupted to some extent for the rest of that evening.

 

[Iskra]

I’ve had a couple, both internationally in places where I didn’t understand the geography and the language is wildly different. I do better research these days, and mobile data is more readily available to solve issue where they occur.

Firstly, in Sweden I booked a sleeper train itinerary and stated the evening I wished to depart on. What I didn’t realise was that the sleeper arrived in this obscure Northern town after midnight. However, to comply with my request to depart on the evening I specified, I was provided with an itinerary and tickets to set off on the specified day, but by first heading South for an hour on a Night train seating carriage to change onto the Northbound sleeper train that arrived at the more Southerly town just before midnight. To make matters worse, the Northbound sleeper train was 3 hours late. So, it took me 4 hours to pass back through the town I’d originally set off from, to head in the right direction. The reason for the train delay was that they’d overbooked the train, so they’d added another carriage into the formation. On boarding, the most beautiful sleeper attendant I’ve ever encountered escorted me to a room, and explained that although I’d booked a shared couchette, they were giving me sole occupancy to apologise for the delay. The lady lingered in the compartment for an abnormal amount of time and looked a bit disappointed to leave but I was far too tired, socially drained and grubby-feeling by this point to realise what might have been, because that was the kind of thing that only happens in dreams. Nevertheless, this trip was the best I ever slept on a sleeper train, so that was a plus.

A second time I travelled from Kiev* to Lviv* on a Rotem unit. As we pulled into a station in Lviv I thought I was clever by confirming via google maps that I was alighting in Lviv. I then went off into the city and explored and retraced my steps to the station for my return train to Kiev. All was going well as I headed to the platform although the train didn’t come into view until a few minutes after it should have done. I thought I’d get a quick picture of the Rotem as it came into the platform. Well I did catch a photo, but not the train as it went flying through without stopping! …I was at the wrong station in Lviv. Some expresses called here, but not all. I was screwed. Luckily, there was a booking office, so I went to seek assistance. It was Orthodox Christmas day, to complicate matters further. The very Soviet-looking clerk spoke no English whatsoever, so some of the younger passers-by who were learning English at school/college/uni were drafted in to translate as they passed-by. The ticket-lady tried to set me up with one of my translators. The ticket lady also insisted that I couldn’t possibly travel on one of the old Soviet locomotive-hauled trains, and that I must travel on one of the shiny, new Rotem units, which presumably meant a longer wait; it was seemingly an issue of national pride. I thus sat in the station booking hall reading my book, with just miscreant Ukrainian youths for company for several hours. When my new train was due, the ticket lady escorted me to the platform, hustled me onboard the train and had a brief interaction with the provodnik which I’m sure went along the lines of “make sure this idiot gets back to Kiev please.”

And here is that very Rotem, passing me by:



*Place names as they were when I visited.