Right now I would happily commit murder.

For the past THREE weekends in a row Network Rail have seen fit to carry out engineering works on the line between Birmingham and Leicester. Now I appreciate that engineering works occasionally have to be done, but this is at least the third or fourth time they have cancelled a couple of week’s worth of trains in the last six months.

They do, of course, provide rail replacement buses instead. And don’t we all love a good rail replacement bus! Just in case you weren’t aware, Birmingham and Leicester are only about forty miles apart and joined by a convenient invention commonly known as a motorway. This means that it should theoretically be highly possible to travel between the two places in a comparatively short space of time. An hour seems like a reasonable amount of time to me.

I got on this particular bus at 17.05. It is now 19.05 and I am still over ten miles from Birmingham city centre

My geography of Leicester is not terribly good but I know for a fact that there is more than one route by which it is possible to get out of the city centre and onto the motorway. Unfortunate then that this driver chose to go down the road which passes the rugby ground, at the exact time at which the rugby crowds were coming out. That, combined with the added complication of the Saturday football traffic, meant that the first half hour of the journey was spent trying to exit a retail park which Tim and I have previously walked to in around 15 minutes

It was gone six o clock by the time we actually got out of Leicester. Unbelievable. We were in Nuneaton by half six, which the driver decided was an excellent chance for him to go and buy a sandwich and have a chat with his mates. What does an extra ten minute delay matter after all when your bus is already running 45 minutes late?!

To add insult to injury, when he finally deigned to pull off it became apparent that he wasn’t going to drive us to Birmingham via the motorway. No, because that would be something approaching common sense and that is something no train operator appears to possess. See, there’s a tiny station called Coleshill Parkway between Birmingham and Nuneaton at which no one ever gets on and no one ever gets off. So the most logical thing to do is clearly to make a massive great big coach full of people who want to go to Birmingham waste an extra half hour by driving at 20mph down B roads in order to get to it.

It took half an hour to cover the negligible distance between Nuneaton and Coleshill. As predicted, no one got on and off but we sat there for ten minutes just to make sure. We’ve just departed now and Birmingham city centre is probably another half hour away

I am so angry that I am actually struggling not to use F words. There is nothing more frustrating than being trapped on a crowded and claustrophobic coach which is travelling at a snail’s pace and driven by an idiot for hours on end, whilst the said idiot blasts an R&B station out of the speakers. There is nothing more frustrating than a journey which should take less than an hour taking in excess of two and a half whilst costing exactly the same amount. I have paid £8.50 for the dubious pleasure of four and a half hours on rail replacement buses today, and no one has had the courtesy to apologise for the not inconsiderable inconvenience this has caused me.

Anyone who has anything to do with rail replacement buses,   Preferably slowly and painfully. And when you do, please go to Hell. My Facebook status currently reads, “Clare has decided that Hell must be a rail replacement bus which is always 15 miles away from Leicester”.

Tags: Leicester, rail replacement buses

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 7:53 am and is filed under Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.