The Train That Didn’t

I am writing this from Preston.

That was not the plan.

The plan was Glasgow. The plan was a reasonable journey time, a window seat, and maybe something decent from the buffet trolley. Instead I have a platform announcement, a termination notice, and 105 minutes of accumulated delay already banked before we got this far.

It started in Wokingham. Every train to Reading was either cancelled or delayed. Comms failures, apparently. Reading to Paddington: trespassers on the line. London Euston to Glasgow: overhead line problems somewhere that apparently required the whole service to give up at Lancashire.

Three legs. Three different explanations. One very long day.

Here is the thing. I chose the train deliberately. I always do, on routes where I have a choice. Not because it is cheaper (it is not). Not because it is faster (today, spectacularly, it was not). Because I have thought about the carbon cost of the alternatives and I do not want to carry it. That is the deal I have made with myself.

Today the infrastructure broke its side of that deal.

And that is the bit that genuinely gets to me. I am not naive about delays. Things go wrong. But this was not one thing going wrong. It was every single thing going wrong, in sequence, all day, on the day I needed to get to Glasgow. Wokingham. Reading. Paddington. Euston. Preston. Each one politely explaining itself, each one adding another shrug to the pile.

There is a point at which the pattern becomes the message.

I have been in boardrooms where exactly this happened. Not trains, obviously. But the same logic. The same accumulation of individual failures that no one owns because each one is technically explainable. The death of a system by a thousand apologies.

I believe in public infrastructure. I believe in shared solutions. I believe in the idea that getting on a train instead of a plane is a small act that adds up. But the infrastructure has to function for that belief to mean anything. You cannot ask people to make the sustainable choice and then make that choice a misery.

Today it was a misery.

Preston is fine. Lovely, probably. But I was going to Glasgow.

Scott