I hate airport parking for its criminally high cost and the risk of terrible things happening to my pride and joy while it’s left alone. Also, If I have to drive after a flight it means I can’t relax on the plane with a couple of beers. To avoid this inconvenience afflicting our recent vacation my wife and I elected to use the train, taking us from the station on our doorstep, underneath London and on to Heathrow Terminal 2.
Unfortunately, the photograph above is key to the topic of this discussion; illustrating as it does a station with a complete lack of train in it. This was the scene that met us just four miles from home, as public transport managed to successfully complete only most of the task we hired it for.
And I can’t see it ever getting any better.
Our nearest station is only a three minute walk from our house, so we reckoned that England’s fabulous integrated public transport system would be just the ticket for whisking us swiftly and cleanly to the airport and back. It wouldn’t be cheap at £60 each, but by the time we factored in fuel and parking we would break even on what it would cost to go by car. The railway’s promise of a complete journey there followed by a complete journey home got the nod mainly on the basis that I wouldn’t have to bother with an evening drive home from the backside of London.
To be fair to it, getting there was a cinch. There was a five minute delay near Forest Gate because another train in front had done something silly but we arrived at Heathrow with plenty of time for a cheese and bacon croissant before boarding the very lovely vintage Icelandair 757-200 (Rolls Royce RB211’s for the win).
The return flight was only about ten minutes late to land but after the mechanical crawl through London’s sewers we only reached our London terminus, Liverpool Street, just after 22:00. The commuter train we had taken at 07:00 on Friday had been a train that served Harwich International, considered one of the most important sea ports in Britain. Ha, not at 22:00 on a Sunday it isn’t. That time of night trains have a total disinterest in Harwich, and with it the two closer stations, including ours in Mistley.
Our train was willing to drop us at Manningtree station but gave the Harwich branch the finger and then fucked off to Norwich. It made itself perfectly clear that, from that point, we were on our own. At 23:00 there were no buses, and you’d be bloody hard pressed to drag a non-pre-booked taxi driver out of the pub at that time of night, so we were buggered.
And even if a cab had been available, we were still ultimately replacing the final stage of our public transport journey with a car, just somebody else’s.
And as it happens, a car came to our rescue. A silver VW Passat estate owned by the nicest couple in the world, who were themselves returning from a long weekend in Paris. They overheard us planning the four mile walk home, encumbered with suitcases and bags of duty-free beers and spirits, and told us quite succinctly that “you can’t do that”, whence they drove us to our street which was totally the opposite of the direction they were planning to go. And for this they declined payment (which was just as well as I had about thirty Icelandic Kroner on my person.)
So that’s it. From this little skirmish we have confirmed that public transport can only truly work if there’s some kind of car waiting at the end of every journey.
Are your experiences any different?
(Top image Chris Haining / Hooniverse 2016, Second image Google Maps screen cap, third image via Youtube with some high quality MS Paint editing)
Public Transport: Efficiently Getting You Most Of The Way Home
About
-
You need to have the Uber app.
-
Because my wife works downtown, we chose to live right on the subway line anyhow, as there’s really no other way for her to get to work (well, not with $25/day parking). It’s good 95% of the time (about as quick as driving downtown, without the whole rush hour traffic hassle bit). But, once a month or so, there tends to be some goings on that just cripples the entire system for hours (usually something breaking because the system’s about 60 years old). Thankfully, she’s in a professional position which means she can kind of show up whenever and no one cares.
Going the other way, one of the subway stations in walking distance is the terminus for the airport bus, which is wonderfully convenient, when it runs. We found out the hard way, coming in on the red eye on a recent trip, that it runs less than every half hour at dawn on a Sunday morning. Which, of course we missed it by a minute or so because of all the old people and families on the plane who just had to stand in the aisle and deliberate every move. -
There was a time when a helicopter service used to run shuttles across town to the airport every two hours. There was a time when I lived two blocks from the helipad. By the time I moved there, the helicopter place had been out of business for years. I guess that’s fortunate, since most days I don’t need to go to the airport, and helicopters are loud and messy.
-
Back when ‘The Troubles’ were on in Northern Ireland, I went to a friend’s wedding in a little coastal town near Belfast. After the wedding and the departure of the bride and groom a few of us from the other side of the world, who were visiting Ireland for the first time decided that we’d join up and do a bit of sight-seeing in the lovely Georgian city of Dublin a long way across the border.
The trip went very well with much sightseeing and much pub visiting with the hilariously hospitable Irish, who I ended up thinking could possibly out-drink even Australians. After a great few days and meeting people, (some of who I’m still in touch with with, all these years later), we took the train back to Belfast late on a Sunday afternoon.
It ran late, which meant that we missed the bus, which provided a connection service to the smaller station where the coastal line started. The sole purpose of this bus was to connect these two services on different lines, but the driver decided not to wait for our slightly late train and departed empty for the coastal line’s station. There was no other bus but the two stations didn’t look that far apart on our tourist map so the four of us decided that we’d walk to the next station with our luggage, as there was plenty of time to catch our train which was the last for the day.
Off we set through what quickly became apparent was some sort of deserted war zone with barbed wire and bullet marks seemingly covering everything. Our ‘Plan B’ of hailing a cab was now looking very unlikely.
But we heard a vehicle. Around a corner came a diesel powered vehicle but it wasn’t a taxi, it was an armoured Land Rover. It stopped near us and from the hatch on top a soldier appeared, whilst at the same time another three soldiers appeared as if by magic next to us on the other side. They were all looking at us through the sights on their rifles which I oddly remember as looking very clean and nicely oiled.
The soldier standing in the hatch asked us in a broad Birmingham accent ‘What the hell we thought we were doing wandering round here’.
I replied that the train from Dublin was late, the bus hadn’t waited and that we were walking to the next station. Onhearing our NZ accents the guns lowered and smiles appeared. ‘Only idiot Aussies would be stupid enough to walk through this part of Belfast at sunset’
I refrained from pointing out that we were similarly accented NZers while the now much less hostile Brummie said that they’d give us a lift if they had the room, but also they didn’t want to make us IRA targets by being too friendly with us. But that they would follow us at a distance to make sure we got to our destination safely.
Our little stroll was completed some ten minutes later at our railway station with the Land Rover following at a distance of some twenty metres, the ‘loose’ three soldiers having melted away as magically as they’d appeared.
Perhaps this was TLDR, but Chris, at least you avoided nearly being shot.?
http://i991.photobucket.com/albums/af33/roykinsella/AA-NIBALandroverPigletsnatch.jpg-
Wow. Your story thoroughly eclipses mine. I’m actually a little jealous, though I do appreciate how few rifles there were being tilted at us on Sunday night.
-
It’s one hell of a lot easier to travel to, and in, Northern Ireland now.
My arrival was similarly harrowing back then.
My trip from NZ had involved coming through the US with stays in Honolulu, L.A., San Diego, Chicago and New York and I’d landed in Manchester to stay a while with my sister, then a train to Newcastle with a flight to Belfast. This schedule had been £200 cheaper than landing at Heathrow and then flying to Belfast direct, and gave me a few days with my sister, (who still lives there.) But my odd itinerary immediately aroused suspicion as I was a twenty -something year old male travelling alone and as it transpired, through virtually every den of IRA overseas & UK support and funding. I was taken aside on arrival and strip and cavity searched which was a little uncomfortable,( to say the least), with all my possessions being thoroughly searched and the lining of my bags cut open. I had to operate my camera and shine a light through my extra camera lenses to show they weren’t weapons and unfold all my clothes which were all carefully searched
The only silver lining was that I met the same customs crew on leaving and they remembered me. I showed them my photos of my trip, and the senior official laughed when I said we’d been to Dublin and said I wasn’t helping my case, but since he knew the brides grandfather he now knew my story checked out and let me through without all the bother I’d gone through on the way in.
I’ve never experienced anything like it at any customs office since.
I’ll never forget that trip.
-
-
-
Bergen famously lacks a wholesome public transport system. It was the first city in the world with a toll “pay wall” on every entrance, but busses would drive erratic lines, impossible to understand, for decades after that. All through my student time, if you wanted to take a bus somewhere, times posted at the stops would only tell you when the bus would leave from the first stop of the line. No help in that if you’re in the middle of it. So I biked everywhere, averaging at times 200km/week.
When we moved out of the city, we examined traffic patterns. It’s a fishing city, traditionally directed towards the sea. So most people still move to the islands north and west of it, or south where the money flows. The issue with islands is that bridges are massive chokepoints. The most efficient public transport there are speed boats/catamarans. We decided to move east to the city, where house prices are 40% of everywhere else, and we can take the Oslo train back to the city.
We have rarely met someone who has considered moving here, and everyone says it’s an eye-opener once they come here. Entrenched herd thinking is VERY Norwegian.
The airport is south of the city and we get there just fine. The biggest public transport endeavour locally is building a tram though. A huge quibble is going on about whether to build it right across the world-heritage “Bryggen”, which I myself consider hurtfully idiotic. But it looks like they will do it.
https://crowdstorage.blob.core.windows.net/projects/d84abcf0-efd4-4247-b461-0d32b4951d74-
New link with good illustrations of how a tram will look like across the World Heritage Site Bryggen:
http://www.nrk.no/hordaland/dette-svarar-fagfolka-pa-pastandane-om-bybanen-over-bryggen-1.12912803
-
-
In the end you scored. Pay it forward.
-
Great story. Especially the kindness of strangers part. Sounds like you might have been a bit more of a trainspotter about that schedule thing.
I once decided to be all independent and not ask friends to drive me to the airport. Took the bus. I arrived so slow, that the counter staff told me to run for the departure gate. I more or less threw my backpack at them, and hoped it would catch up with me some day. When I got to the plane, it was remarkably still there. They opened up the door for me. Pretty sure I was the least popular person on that flight.
On a different trip, in Germany, Deutsche Bahn had to do some maintenance or whatever on some tracks. So instead of one transfer between heavy rail, we transferred in Leipzig to a regional train; which stopped in some podunk town where we transferred to a tour bus; then we drove ( a very long way through a lot of Osti cow country. I just had to laugh at one point. We were so entirely in their hands.) through a tiny town on a hill, dominated by a grim jail at the top of a hill – tiny roads through the town and we came upon an MB Elk with a student driver approaching us – I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes that large; on the oustskirts of town, we walked across a dewy field to a disused train stop; five minutes later, a very brown commuter train from the fifties showed up – not luxurious, but quite functional; then we eventually reconnected with the original line, and made the final leg in a posh modern train back to our point of departure. And D-B maintained the published schedule. I’m still blown away by that feat. Fortunately we had been both conveyed and recovered at the terminii by other folks with capable autos. -
I have used BART in the SF/Oakland bay area to get to work and to SFO. Works out well in those cases.
Leave a Reply