Excuse Me, Where’s My Train?

I know I have gone on a lot about Southeastern Railway and their inability to run a train service, with many services delayed and some cancelled due to a bit of snow, but tonight they actually went one better and made a train disappear!

As has become the custom this year, I have spent a bit of time each day, before leaving the office, checking the Southeastern website to check to see what problems are occurring and whether it’s gonna take me 3 hours to get home. Luckily the majority of my trains have been on time when leaving St Pancreas, it’s just on the journey is where it manages to make itself late!

And so I was elated when I saw that my train, the 1725, was scheduled to be on time and upon arrival at the station I made my way to platform 13 expecting to see something like this:

But I didn’t!

The platform was empty although the platform display told me that the train would be leaving in 6 minutes time. Unfortunately, by the time that this had counted down to one minute, there was still no sign of the train arriving from its inward journey.

One minute after its supposed departure time the platform displays changed to announce the arrival of the next train as if nothing had happened and the 1725 had departed as normal. The guard who was due to be on the train had no idea where it was either, as he stood on the platform trying to answer passenger’s questions, which were all along the lines of “where’s our train?”.

Instead of hanging around asking questions that I knew wouldn’t get a decent answer, I decided to get onto the next available train and at least get a seat before everyone else piled onto it. And then I had a thought, check the 1725 train’s progress on the website via my phone.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was scheduled to be on time upon it’s arrival at Gillingham! Surely that couldn’t be right? I refreshed the page and got the same answer. “Must just be an error!” I thought, “I’ll check it closer to it’s arrival time at Gillingham”. And so I did. 5 minutes before it was supposedly due to arrive at Gillingham I checked again and got exactly the same response (while it showed mine was going to be 5 minutes late, typical!)

So where did this train go? It certainly didn’t arrive at any of the stations on its route, and it certainly was never on time. The guards at Gillingham even confirmed the train hadn’t come through. Somehow a whole train had disappeared while still calling invisibly at the stations on its route.

Well done Southeastern!