STUCK OUTSIDE OF BALDOCK WITH THOSE TRAIN DELAY BLUES AGAIN

December 2024. Baldock.

The 17th December, Mrs RM’s birthday, a dress rehearsal for the main event five days later.

Ideally both these birthdays will be spent somewhere new, foreign and exciting, or failing that Bathgate. But Mrs RM is down south attending to her infirm parents in Royal Tunbridge Wells (by taking them to drink in Harvey’s pubs), while I attend to an infirm parent in Waterbeach (by bringing her Ovaltine).

So we decided to meet half-way, our two hour long rail trips meeting in the giant space behind King’s Cross St Pancras for overpriced tapas and craft cans in Coal Drops Yard.

I never made it.

Just clear of Addenbrookes the 10:56 Great Northern service slams to a halt, the emergency cord pulled.

Yes, Passenger A(for A*****e) has, we hear, attempted to open the doors of a moving train so she can get the train to turn round. Mistaking King’s Cross for King’s Lynn is an easy mistake to make; they should rename King’s Cross.

Half an hour later, the drama abates, and our train chugs serenely (half pace, signal restrictions) towards Baldock, where it again stops. A sad tale, a passenger has been hit on the line at Hitchin, and there’s no prospect of resumption for hours.

“I suggest you make alternative arrangements at Baldock” says the guard to a hundred or so bemused and baggage-laden passengers, most of whom have no idea where Baldock is or whether any “arrangements” can indeed be made, and a huge queue forms at the station entrance waiting for a bus/rail replacement coach/taxi/miracle.

I know this patch. You can see where I lived when I first escaped the clutches of the Fens, near that blue Parking sign bottom left.

It’s a while since I last visited, back in that unimaginable COVID time of the Rule of 6, when drinking at the Orange Tree was confined to the “pub wine gardens” beloved by Tory MPs.

“Scuse me mate, are there any pubs in Baldock” asks a cheery bloke on his way to a session in London before heading home to Worthing.

It transpires that, yes, I can suggest a pub, and can even direct him to the front door of the lone GBG entry in town.

And ten minutes later, having failed to find any local buses that will get me back to Cambridge, I join him at the bar.

and find a seat by the raging fire,

where I sent Mrs RM a pic of the birthday cards she should have had.

She’s long given up on me, and is in the Euston Tap. Wise choice.

More on the Orange Tree in Part II.

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

17 thoughts on “STUCK OUTSIDE OF BALDOCK WITH THOSE TRAIN DELAY BLUES AGAIN”

  1. You were VERY unlucky there Martin.
    “There’s no prospect of resumption for hours” but we wouldn’t want the ‘efficiency’ of Victorian times. Shortly after noon on 19th December 1866 the recently opened railway between Moorgate and Farringdon had the Thames Ironwork Company working overhead and a four-ton girder fell on a westbound train killing four passengers but “the line was up and running again within half an hour”!
    I’ve not done badly this year with only two Delay Repay claims ( totalling £42.75 ) from 44 days of train travel over eleven months ( not since mid November ).
    Wishing you all the very best for tomorrow.

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      1. Martin,
        Yes, you’ve put things properly in perspective.
        I don’t think I’ve been in any of the nearly twenty Orange Tree pubs. I see a keg only one on the 101 bus for Newcastle or Hanley.

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    2. Yes, a sad experience for all concerned, but you are correct Paul that back in the 19th century, the priority was always to get services back up and running, as soon as possible, following such an occurrence. A friend, who has long been retired from the railways, used to say, the very same thing, whilst adding, “Nowadays, there’s plod crawling all over the place, trying to work out what happened, even though it’s blindingly obvious!”

      Eileen’s father was a train driver, and a few months before retiring, after a lifetime spent working for British Rail, was in the cab of a coast bound service out of Charring Cross. Just as his train emerged from a tunnel, an obviously very troubled individual stepped directly into its path, with obviously tragic consequences. The event played heavily on my father-in-law’s mind, and as a family we are convinced that it was a contributory factor to the fatal, heart attack he experienced, a few months’ later.

      You can imagine then, that as a family, we take a very dim view of people who choose to end their lives in such a fashion.

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      1. Paul,
        My father’s family worked on the railway for just over a century but I’m not aware of any of them being drivers or experiencing anything like that.
        All such incidents are a tragedy. Worst was probably the Ufton Nervet rail crash of 6th November 2004 when a passenger train collided with a stationary car on a level crossing with seven people, including the drivers of the train and the car, killed as a direct result of the suicide of the car driver.

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  2. Who amongst us hasn’t ended up in a Hertfordshire pub with a stranger after the collapse of the Cambridge rail service?

    My impromptu companion quickly turned out to be interested in more than a drink to while away the time.

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  4. “Nowadays, there’s plod crawling all over the place, trying to work out what happened, even though it’s blindingly obvious!”
    Paul, I’ve now remembered being told that it’s actually doing a very thorough search trying to retrieve every part of the body.

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  5. People don’t “choose to end their lives in such a fashion”, they find themselves compelled to do so. Mental illness is a disease, so why do we have such a difference in our attitudes between these deaths and those of cancer victims after their brave fights? We never hear about brave fights against depression.

    I know it’s difficult to find sympathy for others when your train has been delayed by over three hours, but taking “a very dim view” seems like a very unfortunate choice of words.

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    1. Will,
      Yes, and I’m sure my daughter didn’t take “a very dim view” of whoever at Bushey delayed her by many hours with getting home from Kent three months ago.
      Over a hundred years ago several members of my family took their own lives, mainly by drowning in the Thames. One though drank hydrochloric acid and the inquest revealed her horrendous situation in Victorian Paddington, far worse than what Dickens’s novels described, with the suicide note indicating anguish added to by concern for those affected by such a death.
      We live in much more fortunate times but that doesn’t make them times that everyone can cope with.
      Travelling five days ago I met and chatted with someone with quite significant mental health problems. Later I realised that at least society has moved on from half a century ago when a “The Nutter on the Bus” sketch was just a normal part of an evening’s entertainment.

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      1. Yes, people nowadays apparently talking to themselves are more likely to be actually talking to someone via a device, with buds in their ears. But how can we tell? (Apart from the buds, obviously.)

        Someone telling their parents/boyfriend to stop bugging them could easily be telling the devil to get off their shoulder. And *vice versa*.

        But seriously, hydrochloric acid is pretty desperate. Trains are much quicker. Except for the passengers.

        Sorry – not feeling very festive. But don’t worry – visiting some of my favourite pubs in Sheffield is very therapeutic. 😄

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