Transported: To The Late Shift

Until last week, I have been generally pleased about my commute which is now just past its fourth year. The occasional mishap notwithstanding, the majority of the travel has been hassle free and on schedule. This last week however I discovered a whole new world of train travel which shocked me a little and made me miserable, a lot.

It was the later hours commuting. For various reasons I changed my working hours from 9 to 5 to 10 to 6 so my morning train was no longer the 0700, 0730 or 0800, but instead changed to the 0830 or 0900. My evening train was meant to be the 1825 or at the latest the 1852 which would get me back to Bristol by 1915 or perhaps 1940. All manageable I thought until I tried to follow this new timetable.

The first thing I discovered was that these hours between 8am and 9am are peak hours for most workers, let alone commuters. There was no hope of grabbing a quick coffee on the way to the station because the queue was out to the door. The wave of commuters I passed as I approached made my feel claustrophic as hundreds of them (as they seemed to me) headed to the city centre en masse. The trains had plenty of carriages but they were ridiculously full as the tickets had just hit their off-peak price which was sometimes as cheap as half the cost of the peak ones.

During the half-term I couldn’t even find a seat and perched in one of the bicycle little areas. So I gave up my coffee and the quiet and the silence. I became used to weaving in and out of crowds of people on the way to Temple Meads and avoiding bicycles through Queen Square. I thought it was probably not too bad.

The worst was yet to come. The evening trains from Cheltenham to Bristol became horrendous. I would arrive at the station at 1800 and the boards wouldn’t even bother with five or ten minute delays. On one day the 1825 was due at 1922 and on this last Monday it was due at 1855. It seemed that every time I showed up at the station I would have to wait nearly an hour and then inevitably the delay would increase as I sat in the waiting room. On Friday night I arrived home after nine o’clock and on the Monday that just passed I was back in time to wash the dishes for 2048.

I have now gone back to my normal hours and after the horror of 13 and 14 hour days I felt motivated enough to catch the 0627 and 0700 to work. The streets were empty, the lights were orange and the trains left on time, both in the morning and the evening.

Utter bliss.