Well, get this: not only are there no trains between Birmingham and Leicester for the fourth (did I mention that it was the FOURTH?!) Saturday in a row, there are also no trains between Leicester and Peterborough! :cry: Or, to be precise, there is a train from Leicester which stops at Stamford (where on earth is Stamford anyway?). From Stamford there is then a rail replacement bus to Peterborough. There’s only one thing which could be more fun than catching one rail replacement bus on a Saturday – catching two rail replacement buses on a Saturday!

Oh, and did I mention the timings?! In turns out to get to Peterborough for 10am, I would need to leave Birmingham New Street at 6.15am. That would necessitate me catching a bus from my suburb before half five … but of course, buses don’t run so early in the morning So I would have to walk. To be fair it’s only six miles, but it’s through an area where I’m loathe to be, on my own, at that time. Basically, not happening!

The best I can do is to get a bus at half six and catch the following rail replacement bus at 7.15. That will allegedly get to Leicester for 9am, although it may disappear down a warp in the space-time continuum somewhere around Coleshill Parkway. There’s a pretty tight turn around time at Leicester to get on the correct train, so I’ll need luck to actually make it, but if I say some prayers, the train departing Leicester at 9.14, plus the supplementary bus, should get me to Peterborough for 10.35.

I then have to get to Suffolk, but somebody else is driving so it’s not my problem

I am considerably upset with National Rail. I have to get up at half five tomorrow morning to get to London and will have to do likewise on Monday, so it would have been nice to have a lie in of sorts on Saturday. I feel sorry for myself

This, however, is what I am most outraged about: I decided to have a look on National Rail Enquiries to see if there were going to be trains to Leicester next weekend.

The result?!

It turns out THERE ARE NO TRAINS BETWEEN LEICESTER AND BIRMINGHAM ON ANY SATURDAY FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH OF APRIL!!!!!

I think I might explode. I would like to think I do not have anger management issues, but this is seven Saturdays in a row on which I will have to spend six hours travelling to see a boyfriend who only lives forty miles away! I am going to relieve my feelings by writing to someone to complain, I just haven’t figured out who yet…

I really need to learn to drive.

 Update

Further checking of National Rail Enquiries indicates that there are also no trains on three out of the five Saturdays in May.  A normal service does not appear to resume until June, by which point I may have spontaneously combusted!  I have just emailed Cross Country Trains, who run this non-service.

I have just been checking the journey planner for the next three months and I am horrified to see the alterations to schedules on your route between Birmingham and Leicester.

There have been no trains on a Saturday for the past three weeks, and according to National Rail there will be none on any single Saturday in April plus three of the Saturdays in May.

I understand that a certain amount of engineering work has to be done but to cause this much disruption to a single route over such a prolonged period of time shows an utter disregard for passengers.

It took me two and a half hours to get from Leicester to Birmingham last Saturday evening, which is simply not acceptable.  The driver chose a ridiculous route out of Leicester which passed the football and rugby grounds at the precise time the crowds were exiting.  He then proceeded to drive down narrow country lanes between Nuneaton and Coleshill (which were too narrow in my opinion for the vehicle to pass safely).  Predictably, there was no one who wanted to get either on or off at Coleshill.

I would suggest that you run more bus services between Leicester and Birmingham so that those who want to go direct do not have to put up with a ridiculously convoluted journey to the middle of nowhere.  I would also suggest that you reduce your prices on days when you are not operating a train service to compensate for the severe disruption you are causing your passengers.

I travel to and from Leicester every Saturday and I do not see why I should pay £8.50 for a journey which takes twice as long as that which you are contracted to provide.

I shall be making complaints to as many higher authorities as I can find!

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 :cry:

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”.