Andrew Dubber     

This is the wrong sort of train

I spent a very pleasant evening playing ‘hackgammon’ with Stef at the Fighting Cocks — a game similar in most respects to backgammon, but with a variation in that it involves coding a random number generator within a spreadsheet on a laptop to make up for the fact that there were no dice in the box.

We were by far the geekiest people in the pub that evening.

Hackgammon also involves not entirely remembering where the pieces go when you set up the board, but taking an educated guess and making do with the results. Improvisational gameplay. Like jazz without the music.

Actually, I’m not sure how advisable it was to even go out and have a drink at all under the circumstances. I had a flight to Chicago to catch this morning, and the plane was leaving from Manchester airport — a two-hour train journey from Birmingham. So — an early start and I was yet to pack or prepare anything. I didn’t even have any detail yet about where I’ll be staying in Chicago.

It’ll be fine…
Still, it was the opportunity to go and hang out with Stef, have a scotch in a relaxed setting and talk about some ideas and new projects. I could pack quickly, get a few hours sleep, then make the most of the long journey by napping repeatedly.

Of course, you can’t go direct from Birmingham to Manchester airport. That would be too easy. There’s at least one change involved. So I chose the most direct route that would get me to the airport by 9am, two hours before my flight was due to depart. I was to go through Crewe.

Bobbie had advised me to go up to Manchester the night before, so I wouldn’t be too rushed in the morning, but that seemed a little over-cautious to me. Why spend money on staying the night somewhere when the trains were perfectly reliable, and there was plenty of time to get to Manchester Airport by 9am? It’s only a couple of hours away.

So she took me to the train station by 6am and my train was at ten past. I settled into the otherwise empty carriage and made myself comfortable. I guess we’d been moving about a minute and a half before I noticed that stops being announced were not the ones I had been anticipating.

Bristol, for example, is not on the way to Crewe. Quite the opposite. It’s lovely and everything, but just wrong in every important respect for my purposes today.

The wrong sort of train
So for the next hour, I was stuck on a train which was ambling its way through lovely countryside in completely the wrong direction. I spoke to the train staff, who did some quick calculations and reckoned that best case scenario, I would now be able to make it to the airport by 10.56am at the earliest. My flight was at 11am.

You can’t arrive four minutes before an international flight, apparently. They don’t let you do that, despite those misleading things you see on TV where the main character gets ushered through the check-in and onto the plane at the last possible second.

There was a sort of resigned panic that followed — an odd and contradictory emotional state — that comes from being in a completely untenable but unchangeable situation.

I’d paid £400 for an airline ticket, and chances were strong that I was going to have to do it all over again just because of some bad signposting at New Street Station (and perhaps a somewhat unclear head). But I made some phonecalls and explained the situation a few times to a number of different people who have jobs where they have to talk to people like me at 7am — and the very nice woman at the ticketing desk for BMI at Manchester offered to swap my ticket for one on the same flight tomorrow instead.

“After all,” she said, “it’s not like you did it on purpose.”

No. It’s not like that at all.

So – after an hour heading South, I had a cup of coffee in Cheltenham Spa (first stop on that particular journey), then hung around for 45 minutes so I could get back on a direct train to Manchester (via Birmingham, naturally), where I’m spending the day, finding a cheap place to stay the night and trying to go to Chicago again tomorrow.

Tagged: Travel