Wednesday 9 January 2013

UN-Happy birthday!

Happy birthday London Underground: 150 years young today!  In a fit of largess, I am discounting the minor delays I suffered on the way home yesterday as a present.

This morning, however, I dropped off my daughter at day care and took the Hampton Court train into Waterloo, earning a 13-minute delay owing to a person taken ill on an earlier train leading to a proliferation of red signals to be held at.  The connecting tube to Edgware Road was delayed by one minute.  That's a 14-minute total for £35.



UPDATE: make that an un-happy birthday.  Tube from Edgware Road to Waterloo might have been on time, keeping within the spirit of the birthday celebrations and New Year's resolutions, but the trains were playing silly buggers again.

Allegedly, 'signalling problems in the Barnes area' were causing delays.  Quite why this should affect my train, which does not lie on a line remotely near Barnes, was not made clear.  I got on one train which, after a half hour sitting at the platform beyond its scheduled departure time, told me to get off and get on another train, which did eventually depart - only about five or six minutes after it was supposed to.  In all, I got home 46 minutes late.  That's another £115.

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