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Showing posts from August, 2024

Day 0: Terminated Trains

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Last week, the weather in the Western Isles was, according to pretty much every weather app going, pretty decent. That is to say 18 degrees and sunny.  Last Saturday night, engineers had not decided to make a dogs dinner of repairs to the railway.  Timing, as they say, is everything.  Today started innocently enough. I had, months ago, planned transport which would take me from Wiltshire to the tiny village of Tyndrum, 55km from the Port of Oban and the smallest village in the world to have 2 train stations.  Getting to Tyndrum was, in theory, reasonably straightforward. Get the train to London, ride across London to Euston, then take the Caledonian Sleeper train north.  Those overnight engineers had other ideas though. The late finish had caused havoc with the train service from Bristol to London, with the train which I had booked and 3 others being cancelled.  I plumped for an earlier train which was apparently running, and set off. The 10km or so to Chippenham was uneventful, the bi