23h49. Home. Finally. After this:

I should have known. The day started on a dodgy note. I arrived at Chelmsford to find the clocks stuck on 02h25 and several seconds. My train was cancelled, too, and the next one was running late, so by the time it arrived we were treated to the hilarious came of fitting twelve carriage-worths of people onto a four car train.

It was a hot and sticky journey, but nothing compared to tonight.

(This is rapidly turning into a public-transport blog. I wonder if there is call for a spin-off…)

Anyhow, I worked late, hit save at the end of my 6,000 word feature and headed off on a stuffy tube to Liverpool Street in search of a train. Arriving, I found the 19h00 trains still on the board, all of them showing delayed.

So, I went for a walk around the back of the station where there’s a water… erm… ‘feature’, I guess you’d call it, which tipples down a stony bank beside a nicely mown lawn and you can look down on the platforms. Nothing was moving, and nothing did for the next couple of hours. I returned to the station to sit and wait it out.

The Irish voice that does the announcements there blamed the whole thing on a fatality at Forest Gate that the police were investigating. Strange how often it happens just there. Merely coincidence, or something more sinister?

Anyhow, the station got more and more full as more and more trains were delayed or cancelled, and eventually the voice started to say that there was no more information but if they found out anything they’d let us know.

It seems Paul and Jon were going through the same thing, and Trevor had agreed to come out and pick them up from Epping - the end of the Central Line. That turned out to be my rescue, too, in the end, when I finally heard my phone ringing and arranged to meet them there after they’d all found pizzas and sated their hunger.

Of course, it couldn’t be quite that easy. As I clambered down to the tube they imposed speed restrictions on the service to combat the overheating, and the next two trains were going down the wrong branch of track.

I made it in the end, though, and now am home, scanning the sites for news of what is going on, but it seems that this, like every other major disruption, is being royally ignored. Perhaps they’re just becoming all too humdrum these days.

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