another train adventure

hello there

actually, "adventure" may well prove to be a bit dramatic. of late i have made any number of train journeys. several, look you see. mostly, if not in each instance, they have been conventional things, lacking any sense of danger or, well, adventure. but here we are, and a catchy headline is always a good thing. except, i suppose, when it is a trifle misleading. i was on a train, though.

should it be so that adventure is not the right word as such, then perhaps gamble is. many of you shall be aware that, due to the vagaries of it all, British trains are highly prone to being cancelled when not just late. this is all down to "unexpected" weather conditions affecting services. and, in terms of the British train and railway (for they are two different thing), "unexpected" tends to translate very much as being "any". we have well documented instances of trains being cancelled because of the weather being too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, too calm and so on. 

with optimal (and unspecified, as in secret) weather conditions being an absolute must for any British train service to run kind of like it is suggested it will, i was somewhat concerned about the journey i had planned in this particular instance. it was in April (the one just gone), and we, as a nation, had been blessed with a moment of not unique but certainly unusual snow. 

fear and terror strikes the heart, the mind and indeed the very soul of any person wishing to use a train within Britain when they see snow. to you and i a train might seem rather robust and strong, made as it is of several dozens of tonnes of steel and other such metal, giving the appearance that it would ride through or over anything, smashing the absolute f*** out of anything what it twatted. apparently this is not so. most trains are, it turns out, as fragile as a modern day footballer, and if they are exposed to a brief moment of snow, they might trip and slip, smashing into one hundred million billion pieces. for this reason, many train operators cancel all trains if they just for a moment even think it could possibly snow, or rain, or be sunny, so as to be safe. 

but, and this i would say is happily more than it is strangely, it was so that the snow did not stop any train operations on this particular day. well, none of the services which i availed myself of, at the least. it is entirely possible that this is due to some form of legacy (or hangover) from the last year (and a bit), during which the train operators have been handed their greatest ambition. as everyone, more or less, was instructed to stay home, the train people could run the trains without the burden of the thing which they hate the most, which of course is them, us, passengers. 

one could, i suppose, lament the fact that we shouldn't "really" get snow during April, that this is all a sign of Greta and the dolphins losing the war for our planet to, well, everyone who is presently knacking it, which i think is pretty much all of us. but then also, yes, maybe it is not all that so peculiar to get snow at this time. the fact is there was some snow. 

the main, maybe only, think going through my mind as i saw the scene pictured above was what a really great and tremendous act of folly i had undertaken with my shoe selection that day. not that i have all that many pairs (for i still have two feet, momentarily) to choose from. inexplicably, despite knowing snow would grace my visit, for shoes i selected them trainers what i recently got new laces for, the ones where the tread (or grip or whatever) has all but gone. 

rather than rush to discuss, or explore, how that shoe decision went, here you go, a bit of video. 

sorry, or apologies, if they are required, for the ambient noises in the above video. if there are any, and if it is so that you played the video with sound on. an actual, real life moving train is not quite the optimal place for doing filming and that. 

moving on, and the shoe thing, then. as it turned out, or as it happens, snow in April, and the undercurrent of icy stuff, is just as slippery as that from any other time of the year. somehow i managed to keep my balance, despite constantly feeling a sense of slide and slip. after the fifth instance of feeling none foot slip forward i stopped counting. no, alas, and i know this will be a disappointment to some, i did not make any complete fall. 

yes, we are indeed still required to wear them face mask things. at the least at time of writing it was so. not sure why, exactly, one must wear one on a desolate, lonely, outside train platform, the location of which is one not many stand upon, but the fine imposed for not doing so appears a trifle hefty. 

despite the fact that i appear to be making use of the trains on a frequent basis (unless they get all petty and ban me for comments made here, which strikes me as paranoid), no, i have no immediate plans to write or publish pics and observations of the majority of such trips. maybe i will if something seems interesting, of course. and my threshold for interesting seems to get forever lower. 

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!