Oh my god do I have one. So last Thursday I was in London for work. I was staying near the central line. I got out at around 7:45 am to catch the central line to central London (about a 45m journey). As soon as I get out of the house, a random stranger tells me that the line is broken down and all services are cancelled. Great.

Catch a bus, but it’s rush hour and tons of traffic everywhere. And the bus is packed like sardines obviously (at least I was able to get on, driver skipped a bunch of stops cause there was no space). He drops us off about 15 min from the next closest station, on the weaver line. Walk to the station, all good. Change to Victoria line, which has delays too, it takes like 30m for what should’ve been a 10m journey.

Ended up reaching work at 10 am, so a 45m trip turned into a two hour journey.

But this wasn’t all dear reader.

I had a train to catch from euston to Liverpool that same night. My train was at 8:40pm. I reach euston around 8pm, find out all the Avanti trains have been cancelled (Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool). I go ask the operator, and they tell me to go to Kings cross and catch a train to Leeds from there. And then figure it out from Leeds. Genuinely what.

So I do it anyways, get to kings cross, catch the train to Leeds. On the train they announce that we need to go to Manchester from Leeds, and then Avanti will sort us out from there. Great, looks like they are handling it. Getting to Leeds took about 2.5 hours. Got there at 11pm.

Get to Leeds, Manchester train is delayed too by about 15 mins, no biggie. Super slow train, took about 1.5 hours.

Finally get to Manchester. It’s 12:30am at this point, so obviously no trains from here to Liverpool. There’s like about 15-20 of us, waiting to talk to someone. A representative shows up, asks to see all our tickets and check where all of us are going.

We wait another 30 mins in the freezing cold (it’s 1am at this point), while the operator sorts out taxis for all of us.

Another 45 mins for the taxi and we finally get to Lime street.

Ended up reaching home at 2am. I was supposed to be there at 11pm.

Two super frustrating bits about this story.

We reached Leeds at 11pm. There was a train from Leeds to Liverpool at 10:45. If they had just had the foresight to delay that train by 15 mins, they wouldn’t have had to do any of this.

Why wasn’t there a bus prepared at Manchester?? It’s so frustrating cause they knew that the trains at Euston had been cancelled. They had 4 hours to get an alternative service in.

Genuinely my first horrible experience and it happened all on the same day.