As I've discussed on my blog before, LARPing is pretty big in the UK. Well, last night I had the chance to try out a really awesome new LARP on my way home from Durham. This particular LARP is based on the board game Ticket to Ride. In fact, I was having so much fun playing this LARP that I decided to stay up very late playing it! (Well, it was almost all night except for some serendipity.)
The opportunity to join this game came rather unexpectedly. The train that I needed to use to go one stop to Darlington was 21 minutes late, which caused me to miss my connection to King's Cross, and the next available train from Darlington to King's Cross would cause me to miss my train from Paddington to Oxford (note that I was going to need to take the Tube from King's Cross to Paddington). Yesterday, a guy at Oxford said I absolutely could not go on an earlier train even though I was at the station early enough to do it, so I didn't try doing that this time (even though I was rather early). Every single train up until mine was on time, but then I drew the card of epic fail and that was it.
I talked to various people at the station and the strategy I was given was to go from Darlington to the Birmingham New Street station and then take the Bornmouth train to Oxford. (This would then reverse my itinerary from yesterday except for the brief foray into Darlington, which much to my chagrin didn't seem to have "DEI" written anywhere.)
The train ride from Darlington to Birmingham was about 3.5 hours, and I somehow managed to accomplish the whole thing without a banjo on my knee.
I got some food while I was there (one place was still open) although there weren't any garbage cans in the public part of the station "for security reasons." (They also arbitrarily didn't allow people to use one of the seating areas, and don't allow people to use any of the power sockets in the station, though I snuck a bit of recharging and sitting in before I was told to leave that area.)
I figured I was going to have to wait for 6 hours for the first morning train to get my ass over to Oxford. Then I would have to go through my arduous Thursday (3 tutorial sessions, 1 lecture, an extra 20 minute meeting with a student scheduled for tomorrow, and 1 seminar, which I was likely going to end up skipping) without having had any sleep. Ouch! On the bright side, I was going to get some work done --- I had pretty much finished my letters of recommendation for a former SURF student while waiting at the Durham station, so I was going to finish those (but not upload them to appropriate web sites) and finishing refereeing a paper. I also have a book with me, so I was going to read a bunch of that as well.
However, the guy who kicked me out of the special area suggested I go to customer service in case they could do something. Getting kicked out ended up being a blessing in disguise, because apparently the company actually takes their responsibility to get me home quite seriously. (Imagine that! But of course this is rather different from my experiences in the US...) Basically, they hire cabbies to take people home in such occasions, so as I write this, I am in the customer service area waiting for their hired can to take me home to Oxford. While missing the connection (and the associated connection missings based on which trains were subsequently available) was annoying, I'm very pleased with their method of addressing the situation. And it wasn't like I had to convince anybody to do this. (OK, technically I'm still waiting, but it seems like this is going to work out and I am actually going to get some sleep tonight.)
It turns out that the cab driver was an epic failure as well, as at some point he went 20 miles in the wrong direction and had to backtrack and I ended up needing to walk the last half mile home. Hence, I am finishing this blog entry at 3:30 am instead of an hour and change ago. (By the way, Cornmarket street is really creepy at 3am.)
For what it's worth, none of my mad graph theory skillz were helpful for this LARP.
Anyway, goodnight!
My personal favorite thing about the entire British railway system is the way they will happily issue a ticket from anywhere to anywhere via or not via anywhere to want, but give you *no* instructions whatsoever on how to get there.
ReplyDeleteI'm told that with prolonged use, you get a feel for which stations have lots of transfers in your direction, to the point where delays aren't an issue unless they take out the whole area--which happened to me once at Birmingham New Street.
I think it's a plot to gurantee that everyone in the UK has a firm grasp of geography. Which seems to be working.
On this theme, my most successful tactic on hitting a delay is to turn to the person next to me and say, "I'm trying to get to "place". What do you recommend?" It's a fantastic way to meet people.
Second most successful tactic is to turn on my American accent as broadly as I can and flag down the conductor. This is often OK, but it did get me briefly stuck in Crewe this weekend. (I got unstuck by the helpful agent.)
Crewe is a hole and has relatively few transfers. Do not get stuck in Crewe.
Bristol Temple Meads has a conductor at a kiosk just inside the gates, who will happily not only look up fastest routes but will debate with you whether your chances are better at York or Birmingham or Preston Lancs. He also has a comprehensive knowledge of how the trains are laid out (first class front or back, etc) and where the unreserved seats are likely to be. I suspect there's someone like this in every station, I just haven't figured out how to find them.
The seat reservations system (on Virgin at any rate) is also baffling, but it seems to baffle British people as much as it does me, so that's not as frustrating.
For Christmas, I want a current map of the national rail system--not just one of the companies, and not the 1891 one, which is pretty but also useless for modern travel.
Wren: If you order the tickets online (and I have no found out how truly broken that is...), an itinerary is actually listen. However, you don't have to follow it. (Actually, I'm still not clear if you are allowed to get on a train early if you get there early. If I did that yesterday, I wouldn't have had a problem.) It was actually never made clear to me what the actual instructions/requirements were and when I tried on Tuesday to go earlier, a guy at Oxford said (I think perhaps incorrectly) that I wasn't allowed to do it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I was discussing this with one of the guys at Birmingham yesterday (the guy who was really helpful) and he was basically saying that if one orders online, one can sometimes get absolutely retarded itineraries list. That's what happened with mine, which I ordered before I had ever tried the train system before (so I had no way of knowning it was retarded). I bought it online just because I thought things might sell out and I wanted to get where I needed to go and not have anything go wrong. Next time, I'll just buy the damn ticket at the station. I guess if one doesn't want to reserve a seat one can basically always do that.
Half the time other people have been sitting in my seat anyway. Actually, I think I understand the Virgin seating system, but maybe there are some counterexamples I haven't seen yet.
The useful information I have gotten has often come from conductors. One passenger asked me at some point, but only because he already overheard me asking a question that was highly correlated to what he needed to ask. Also, the people who check your tickets inside the train have a handy machine that they can use to look up all arrivals and departures at all stations (including platform and delay information), so I also asked one of them when they came to check my ticket.
Mason, when you order on-line, how do you pay? When last I tried, in December I think, they wouldn't accept non-UK billing addresses for credit. So I can't order on line.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding to date is that if you get an Advance ticket, tied to a specific train (with seat reservation), you ought to be on that train, although it looks like that's more flexible, since often I sit in a 'reserved' seat and no-one claims it. I had a guy try to explain it to me last weekend, who turned out to be a charismatic fundamentalist, which derailed the conversation. I think what he was saying is that if you have an advanced reservation and want to switch trains, it's easy to do so, but you have to do so at the ticket office before boarding the train. Not something I've explored, since I can't purchase on the web anyway.
For the Saver/Open tickets, you can get on whatever train you're in time for, with some exceptions (mostly long-haul going through London, but some of the more esoteric ScotRail ones, too.)conductors will accept any reasonable route, but be prepared to explain it--I get often get tickets NOT through London (because they're cheaper) and often I'll be on a London-bound train and have to justify that I'm transferring at York/Birmingham/whatever, rather than staying on through London (and then presumably heading west to Bristol). You may not run into that as often, since I imagine connections are generally better *through* Oxford, it being more central.
I'm not sure why you're having trouble ordering online. I have a debit card from Barclay's that I got after about a week here. (Granted, they had to have the silly 'introduction letter' thing from my employers, so it took a few days instead of being instant.) I used my debit card for that. I only use my US credit cards for things that I have paid in dollars (like my flight to LA) and/or had shipped to a US address.
ReplyDeleteThe guy at Oxford was not at the ticket office, but he was in between the waiting room and the trains. My assessment is that he was generally clueless and that I just would have gotten a different answer if I spoke to someone else.
On my way to Durham, I went through Birmingham, which is definitely better than going through London. (To go through London to Durham, I think there is no way to avoid tubing between King's Cross and Paddington.) Oxford is reasonably central, although it's not actually a hub. (Reading, which is just a couple of stops away, is a hub. Birmingham is one as well, and that's about an hour or so away from Oxford by train.) Basically, I can avoid connecting in London for many connections, except in retarded situations like trying to get to Cambridge.
Mason, the bank (HSBC, the only bank in Bristol willing to even talk to me) won't give me a debit card, even with a letter from my employer. I presume this has to do with being on a work permit rather than an actual job. Or I just look unreliable. Hopefully in another 2.5 months, they will give me a debit card.
ReplyDeleteLucky--Bristol isn't precisely a hub. Well, it's a hub if you want to go to Wales or Devon. For points north it's Birmingham or London. I don't remember Paddington to Kings' Cross being particularly hideous, although the last time I did it I was kinda foggy from jetlag. I do recall it being better than the equivalent in Paris. That just sucked.
Right before I moved, I was given the advice by a fellow expat that Barclay's is usually most welcoming of non-UK people until one builds up credit in the UK.
ReplyDeleteI have heard of foreign students (both grad and undergrad) having trouble getting debit cards. Nobody mentioned anything about postdocs, but your being on a work permit could well be playing a big role here.
Paddington to King's Cross isn't horrible, but it's annoying to add a tube connection when one is already switching train lines. And Paddington station itself is anoying when it comes to switching lines and trying to figure out the location of the one you need. Birmingham, on the other hand, is far less hectic and just generally a more pleasant place.