Public Transport: Still Shit, Especially Northern Rail

Fucking Northern Rail. They certainly know how to inconvenience passengers at will don't they?

Thursday I was going into London for the day, it being around a 2 hour journey down to London from Manchester, it's now somewhere you can go shopping for the day, enjoy a couple of beer and head on home late evening.

Now all Northern Rail had to do was get me from Oldham to Manchester. Not a big difficulty you'd think. Jump on train and off you go. Or not.

I picked the train that would get into Manchester Victoria and leave me over half an hour to make my way to Piccadilly, grab some water and some breakfast. Easy? No. They cancelled the fucking train, so I had to wait over 10 minutes for the slower train, thus leaving me just over 15 minutes.

Luckily I was at a manned station too, otherwise I would've been fucked as the conductor's ticket machine wasn't working. That would've meant a good 5 or so minutes having to buy a ticket at Victoria, simply because they haven't managed some kind of system where the fucking machine has a recharger on the train. And that would've meant I missed my train to London.

Luckily I just got my train, no time breakfast or water, just pick up my ticket from a machine and jump on the train to London. Phew! Sweating like a bastard I was.

Most annoyingly, Northern Rail have a record on this. When I used to go up to North Yorkshire a lot, my train from Oldham to Manchester got cancelled so often I just set off really early and got the bus. A lot less convenient than a train, but at least of a frequency where if ones cancelled you can always grab another.

I still think the best was when the guy manning the station offered me an alternative route that got me into Victoria some 2 minutes before my other train set off from Piccadilly. I was going to run a mile in under 2 minutes was I? Do I look like Usain Bolt? No. I look like someone who enjoys his beer and has a pretty sedentary life.

Worse still, used to be you could speed up the journey to Piccadilly by getting the tram - but oh wait, all the tracks are being redone in the city centre, so no.

Cars can be problematic with roadworks and the like, but you have such an option of alternative routes, with public transport you're held hostage to the whims of the operator. And then you have the other passengers. I really want to hear Dizzy Rascal played tinnily through a phone at 8 in the morning, oh go on you little bastards, play it louder! Or the time a guy's dog had a streaming huge shit on the train.

Fuck public transport, up the arse, with a red rubber dick.