Good Day for Trains

Yesterday was a horrible, horrible day for trains. In the morning time, I happily sardined myself into the second train that arrived at Parsons Green (the first having reached the angry sardine phase right as I was coming up the steps). As we were stopped randomly between the Green and Fulham Broadway, the conductor kindly let us know that the District Line was suspended between Earl's Court and Edgware Road, handily including my Notting Hill Gate destination. And I quote (me): 'poo'. So I scampered off the train at Fulham Broadway by a combination of crowd surfing and crawling through peoples' legs and walked outside to catch, god forbid, the bus. For some reason no one else had thought to take the bus as a means of getting to work, so it was me, a number of women with young children lacking volume control skills, and some other casually dressed folk. After much sitting in traffic and pausing to let strollers on and off, I arrived at work only around 10 minutes late (as opposed to my standard 20 minutes early).

After that horrible morning commute, I was pleased to see that everything was running with good service for the evening commute. In lieu of heading home, I was headed to a beer situation in north London, adjacent to Kings Cross/St Pancras. Nothing short of 6 tube lines run through this station, as well as the speedy Paris trains and a whole lot of commuter trains for people that live north of London. Essentially the two words you would use to describe the station are 'big' and 'busy'. I was able to get there easily enough on a circle line train, but I was a little surprised to hear as I was stepping off said train an announcer proclaiming that there was an emergency and we must leave the station immediately. And I quote (me) 'whaaaa?'. No one around me seemed that fussed and we going about their regular business, despite the constant repeating of this announcement and a not-so subtle alarm going off. I was due to meet Mark in the concourse at Kings Cross (neither of us having been there, we didn't really have an idea of a good meeting place), so I followed the signs, but before I could get to Kings Cross, the tide was pushed outside. It was cold, dark, and raining outside, but luckily I was able to find a bit of undercover area. Several minutes passed and eventually everyone was apparently removed from the station and the whole thing was closed. It remained closed for about 10-15 minutes, then they started letting people back in single file. Mark had unfortunately been held up in the resulting massive delays on all train lines that go through the station, and arrive 25 minutes after me.

After the beer situation, Mark and I hopped on a Hammersmith and City Line train back towards my work, which would then intersect with a District Line train to PG at Edgware Road. Now, Edgware Road is a bit tricky as it's frequented by Circle line, Hammersmith and City, and District line trains all on the same platforms, all of the trains look identical and lack real-time information, and the platforms themselves lack information about where trains are actually going. In this confusion, Mark and I ended up on a Circle Line train going back towards Kings Cross, had to get off at the next station and wait for another train to Edgware Road, and then very carefully find a train actually going to Wimbledon. I assure you this confusion had nothing to do with the beer situation.

To briefly touch on the beer situation, it was a festival put on by the Campaign for Real Ale, which seems to be mainly run by men with gigantic beer bellies. It involved a big room full of alphabetically arranged kegs of all kinds of ales and ciders, thus allowing you to go around and get pints or half pints of whatever you wanted, allowing you access to all kinds of otherwise difficult to find brews. It was very cool. And whilst you have to pay to get ahold of the glass you have them fill with the brew, you do get to keep it at the end of the night. Bonus!