February - A Train Rant and Other Stuff

Northern (Comedy Service) Rail Not Coming From Carlisle

 I'll get to the rant in a minute. Bear with me, I need to build up some steam. But the picture above of the "arrivals" board at Newcastle Central Station is a symptom. The station is using the ironic, or maybe sarcastic version of "arrivals" here in that one of the trains is not arriving at all. In fact it hasn't set off.  More of which later.

My second little rant is about blogger , which, once again, has loaded the pictures in reverse order. It fights desperately with me if I try to re-arrange them and I've not yet been bright enough to outwit it by loading the pictures into the picture-selecting box in the opposite order to which they are required. This , the first picture is Lucky The Dog admiring the carpet in the Twice Brewed Inn on Hadrian's Wall.  One of the clauses that Hadrian had written into the contract for Hadrian's Wall was that it went quite close to the Twice Brewed Inn. Mainly because the beer there is very nice and much better than anything you could get in Rome at the time. That and the fact that they don't use much in the way of fomented fish sauce in the steak pie.

LTD looking for a crumb

Sycamore Gap from the North

Sum sheep. No idea how many, I keep falling asleep

Anyway, what of February. Mainly it rained and was very windy. I think it was Very very windy on four or five occasions and at times it was wet at the same time, or otherwise, just before the windy bits. Or just after. Several of the windy bits were Atlantic Storms which had cosy names like "Fluffy" and "Graham". "Ronnie was a bastard and tangled up the wind-chimes in our garden as well as blowing trampolines on to Lane Three of the A1(M) in several places. This was Not Good for the walking. So less walking was done in Feb 2022 than as far back as Feb 2011.

LTD suspects that there may be a gravy bone inside that rucksack

But there were some highlights, apart from the sheltering and drinking tea (Yorkshire Tea, grown in Doncaster) Me and Dawn went camping to Buttermere. This was a bit muddy but we were the only campers there and it was a nice break. Me and LTD managed to bag two very small hills. We left just as it got windy again (yellow warning for severe gales)

Crook and Weardale Ramblers doing a Caledonian-style river crossing

High Force, obviously

The, me and LTD attended three Crook and Weardale Ramblers walks, one of which was snowy, another wet, I mean quite wet... and another on a beautiful spring-like day. Attendance on walks seems to be increasing a bit - specially in terms of the canines. We were up to three doggies in Teesdale. LTD isn't keen on doggies....

White Horse of Kilburn (not ancient!)

Grasmoor, near Buttermere

Buttermere camp

And so, I come to the part where I have a bit of a rant. I had decided to have a night out at a certain bothy, not all that far from Hadrian's Wall and had secreted some firewood there a week or so earlier. I decided, that, rather than abandon a car nearby, I would go on the train - noting that Bardon Mill station was only a hop and a step away from the bothy and twenty quid for a return ticket with a lift home from Mrs Pieman would be a good strategy.

So she took me to the station. The first thing I noticed was that all of the trains coming up from That London were 15 minutes late due to a "security incident" at Peterborough. I had a ten-minute gap between trains, so I hopped on one I shouldn't have been on, according to my ticket.

At Newcastle, the station announcer announced that my train to Bardon Mill was cancelled due to a lack of drivers. A nice lady in a red suit confirmed this and added that the train after it was also cancelled. So I got on a train that went to Carlisle but stopped at Hexham, but not at Bardon Mill. I got the 685 bus to Bardon Mill and arrived only 30 minutes late. This is when it started raining.

I arrived at The Bothy at teatime, got water, fed the dog, put the dog to bed (he stayed there for the next 15 hours, a record - he was clearly fed-up) I lit the fire using some extra coal I'd brought and snuggled in for a very quiet night with brews and scotch and the radio. And LTD's contented sighs snores and farts.

The morning was really beautiful - a bright, sunny and frosty start and we had a lazy breakfast sitting in the doorway in the sun-trap.

The return walk was on paths North of the Wall and then to Twice Brewed for a couple of pints and a stupidly large breakfast and then down to Bardon Mill for the train.  

At Bardon Mill, an announcement was made that the train to Carlisle was cancelled. I began to have a sinking feeling about this. The phone to customer services couldn't confirm either way whether or not my train to Newcastle would or would not run, or even that it existed at all. So I decided to get the bus, which turned up at the bus stop a few minutes after me and LTD and took us to Newcastle, arriving 90 minutes early.

My train was, in fact, cancelled. Had I waited I would have missed the connection to Durham, and you can't get on one of these trains without a seat reservation.

Get my money back? I tried the website and it's impossible to navigate. So I rang them up and they won't talk about refunds on the phone.

If I'm ever faced with Northern Rail again, I think I'll pass and see what the local bus service can come up with. Or I'll drive...

Notice the use of green. All rants ought to be in green ink. It ought to be a rule. Or it's not a proper rant. Fact.

Anyway, it's spring now and the daffies are coming up, there's skylarks and lapwings in the fields and the sap is rising....

Must go backpacking.