I should stop travelling. Weather accumulates where I go. (Birmingham in December: Fog)
I had to go to Manchester for a couple of days last week - Thursday/Friday. On Thursday morning (booked onto 5.50am train) the train was cancelled because the weather Might be Bad later (which is a new and innovative GNER excuse) so I was slightly late but not in any way that caused much disruption.
During the day at work we heard a warning on the PA system that no one was allowed to leave the office because of a power line which had fallen over the exit road. (Luckily it was fixed by the time I had to leave).
We checked various travel sites during the day and noticed that the M60 near my hotel (at Trafford Centre) was closed because of the high winds, so my original plan of getting a lift with a colleague who was driving that way was stymied. Instead the clever plan was that I and 2 other people who were going for trains home (to Cardiff and Leeds) would get the train from Hattersley to Piccadilly and then I could get the tram to the Trafford Centre. Except after we'd been dropped off at the station we found out that the trains were all cancelled. So we got a taxi, whose driver promptly told us that it was no good going to Piccadilly because the station was closed and all trains and trams were cancelled too. eek!
So my travelling companions had no obvious way of getting home. We strong-armed the poor taxi driver into driving us all the way to the Trafford Centre - about 20 miles. Which took us 2 1/2 hours! The traffic was horrendous - gridlocked. We had to divert around several trees which had blown over, and eventually got to the hotel about 3 hours after we left work. Bang went my plans for shopping heaven: instead we had dinner (very nice) and then I went to bed while the others went off with our manager who had 2 spare beds - a massive relief as there were no hotel rooms anywhere in Manchester.
The weather had calmed down by the time I had to travel home on Friday so it would be reasonable to expect that trains might be running again. They were, mostly, except for mine, which was being stroppy and decided that it would start from Preston instead of Piccadilly, so there.
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3 comments:
How dramatic. We apparantly took about 400 storm damage related calls on Thursday ( My fence has blown down- tough, etc). I got hit by a recycling bin blowing across the road ( no damage done) and on the same day had to pull a motor bike off a man who was blown over . The river valley is on flood alert every time it rains as the water table is so high at the moment and the good news is that the hose pipe ban has been lifted.The bad news is that a cyclist fell in the Thames at Port Meadow last night and has not yet been found.
That's really sad. My friend and her bike fell in the canal in Edinburgh at night but luckily got pulled right out by a passing cyclist.
On a point of information: the trains to England from Scotland were reduced in number because it was correctly predicted that if they had all been sent there they would not have been able to get home again because of the nasty weather you were laying on for them.
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