A long, long day today. I was still in the office at half eight tonight, battling the server alongside Kathryn as it resolutely refused to save the pages we were working on. Two crashes and two reboots later we got things sorted, printed off a batch of prints and headed out the door.

Probably just as well. The trains have been mucked up for the last two evening so I may as well have been sitting in the office as sitting on some tracks going nowhere. I might have known that slagging off the trains a couple of entries ago would have brought this on me.

So, last night I left the office and got to the station to find an angry red stripe of ‘delayed’ and ‘cancelled’ signs on the departure board, and an angry throng of pissed-off passengers on the concourse.

I found my way onto the 19h45 eventually, unfortunately next to an irritating American family. For the next hour and a half the mother repeated again and again and again ‘I can’t understand why they’d let us on a train if it wasn’t going to go anywhere.’ She clearly doesn’t comprehend the concept of taking a train out of a platform so you can get some more incoming trains in.

Her kids slurped and noisily ate boiled sweets. Her husband drawled.

Ahead of us, a freight train had broken down, the signals had failed and the passengers on a slam-door train had mutinied and deserted their train, scurrying onto the tracks like ants. That brought everything to a halt and wet had no choice but to sit it out.

Today, much the same. Lines down, I believe, at Hatfield Peverel.

With a rail infrastructure in this condition, perhaps that 186mph Eurostar record was not merely the first time a British train has run at that speed - but also the last.

1. Overcrowded?
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2. Journeys
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3. Trouble on the trains
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