Passengers stranded after train cancelled halfway into journey
PICTURE the scene: you’re several hours into a quiet train journey home from London to Edinburgh, all worries of your trip being delayed having long drifted away.
Suddenly you receive a perplexing email, while the train is still moving, telling you that your journey has in fact been cancelled and you will have to get off at the next stop.
This was the beginning of an “insane” ordeal for hundreds of rail passengers on Monday night, which culminated in dozens of schoolchildren being left stranded and others being forced to take taxis across the border with strangers in the middle of the night.
Five school teachers and the 50 students they were travelling with were among those ordered off the Avanti West Coast train at Preston station in Lancashire.
“We’ve been stuck at Preston since around 6.30pm with 50 12-year-olds,” one of the teachers wrote on Twitter. “It’s now 10.08pm. We’ve just been informed that there is no way of getting us home to Glasgow, as we can’t send kids alone on taxis. A staff member has said we are effectively stuck here.”
The school eventually managed to source a coach to take the group home. In a series of tweets viewed more than 2.6 million times, stand-up comedian James Nokise wrote: “At 4.40pm I jumped on a train from London to Edinburgh. It was comfy, it was quiet. In hindsight, too good to last.”
He explained that at 7.26pm he received an email saying the train was cancelled, which was “a surprise” as it was still moving.
An announcement was then made that the “rumours were true” and the service would be terminating at Preston, but another train to Glasgow was being held to take those onboard to Scotland.
But the Glasgow-bound train was already full and left Preston just as Nokise and his fellow passengers arrived.
Nokise wrote: “It turned out there were no more trains north after that and, excitingly, no forthcoming information. At 9.20pm, news came down: alternative transport had been arranged. Taxis. For hundreds of people. To a city three-and-a-half hours away.”
During the taxi journey, Nokise received an email from Avanti West Coast informing him he would receive £70 compensation, which was how much his ticket cost.
After being dropped off at Edinburgh Waverley station at around 3am, he had to take another taxi to his accommodation.
In his final post on the trip, he wrote at 3.30am: “Thanks for being on this journey with me, Twitter.
“A truly insane odyssey. Five hours late, 11 hours after I jumped on the train. “Let’s never do this again.”
An Avanti West Coast spokesman said: “We apologise to our customers who were caught up in last night’s disruption.
“The closure of the West Coast Main Line for over three hours due to a track defect had a significant impact on our services, with trains and train crew unable to work our planned timetable.”