(no subject)

[nmg]

You know what they say: lunch in Southampton, dinner in London, breakfast in... Preston?

By now, I should have been mid-viva in Stornoway. Instead, I'm in the Apple Store on Buchanan St. in Glasgow.

The original plan had been to get the sleeper overnight from London to Glasgow (arr 0720), then hop on the 1050 from Glasgow Intl to Stornoway, viva the candidate, hop back to Glasgow on the 1935 flight and then get the sleeper back down south.

Instead, I got up this morning at 0730 (having been wondering where my 0645 wake-up call and breakfast had gone) to find that I was still in Preston: signal failures on the West Coast overnight due to cable thieves. To top it off, my phone had managed to kill itself overnight so badly that it needed to phone home to Apple before it would let me do anything (like turn off my alarm, for example). The Caledonian Sleeper doesn't do wifi, or, as it turns out, 240V AC at more than about 0.5A, so I hadn't been able to keep the laptop charged either.

Eventually we crawled into Central at 1110, so clearly the viva is a bust.

Today, therefore, I will be cruising the streets of Glasgow looking for fun (or at least food, drink and a film) until about 2200 this evening.

Edited to add: to top it off, there was no water coming out of the taps in my berth, and Glasgow Central doesn't have a first class lounge (pay for a shower when I'm travelling first class??), so I'm verging on fragrant. Also, the breakfast on the train, when it arrived, was cold.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, how infuriating.

Scant comfort,

[ah-see-argh.livejournal.com]

I know that it's little comfort, but you should at least be elligible for a refund on the tickets... :-s.

FWIW the Eurostar I was riding got cancelled on Monday after we'd been parked up for three hours outside Ashford. (Precipitated by a door "somehow" opening mid trip and some poor soul meeting the track at ~300kmph.) As such I didn't get back to the client site until Wedneday, they aren't happy!

I've been held up by cable theft in the past, I was actually started to mellow out and oppose the death penalty until that became such a problem.

Re: Scant comfort,

[tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)]

I await the accident report for the door on that Eurostar with interest. The RAIB recently completed their second (that I know of) investigation of a modern "plug" door opening while a train was moving. In both those cases a serious technical fault was involved, as well as poor decision making, but neither incident resulted in any injuries. The first case is particularly interesting because the RAIB reviewed CCTV footage which shows passengers noticing that a door is open on a train travelling at 100mph but none of them pull the emergency stop. In the second case the faulty door opened while a guard (with a guard's key) was messing with it, a perhaps less surprising outcome (although still pretty surprising for the guard, apparently).

Re: Scant comfort,

[tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, and he's probably not eligible for a refund. There are exclusions for circumstances outside the control of the rail companies, which includes vandalism and so probably also cable theft.

In theory you could probably sue the thieves. The delay to your journey was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of their crime, and they're hardly going to find the judge sympathetic to their cause. Unfortunately scumbags tend to be too poor to make it worth your while.

Re: Scant comfort,

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Indeed, the compensation form says that they won't accept claims for delays due to vandalism. It isn't clear whether UHI will pay for my travel expenses when I wasn't able to attend the viva, so unless I can reclaim via services rendered at work, I'm out of pocket. otoh, they've so far given every indication on train that they may compensate.

Similarly, the flight from GLA to SYY - I bought travel insurance, but need to check if it'll cover things like this. Reclaiming that via work will be harder, because iirc they ask for boarding passes as proof of travel, which obviously I don't have.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Bloody cable thieves. They're becomming an absolute menace.

[marklesuk.livejournal.com]

can they not put you on an earlier flight?

[marklesuk.livejournal.com]

or train even

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Alas, no; the sleeper is a Scotrail service, whereas the trains during the day are Virgin.

On the plus side, I got to see two films today!

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

That's a mess. Our experience of the sleeper is rather better, but that's cable thieves for you.

Hope you can salvage something out of this!

[jorune.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear that, still you've a chance to wonder around Glasgow. Check out the town hall, it's an impressive beastie. You can check out A1 Comics, 35 Parnie Street, they also have a games shop just around the block. It's right in the centre, just off Saltmarket/High Street.