literally another aussie in london

platform bingo

I had to catch the train out to Canterbury recently.

This means that I had to go to Victoria station.

That bit I managed with ease.

Once at the station, I did what I assumed would be the tricky part, getting the tickets and working out which train to catch.

That was piss easy.

The hard part was working out which platform to get on.

It wasn’t hard, so much as it involved standing at the front of the station, with a couple of hundred other people and waiting for your train to be allocated a platform.

It was like standing in a corn field looking up at an alien ship.

All these wide eyed people daring to not look away for a second incase they miss their platform, get to their train late and either miss it, or worse, get a bad seat.

There are false starts too.

The boards refresh and your train moves along to the next slot, you have that 2 seconds of supreme happiness that only someone standing for a train platform can have, before it is taken away from you.

My train was delayed.

Technical reasons, by this time I had already been standing for 15 minutes, who knows how long I could be standing.

34 minutes was the answer.

Then the platform came up, people were in too much of a rush to even be excited, they all ran, so I ran with them, the doors to the train were opened, I got in, they closed and the train was gone.

Anyone going to the toilet, or getting a cup of coffee would have to find their new train, and then wait for its platform.

The poor bastards.

September 8, 2008 Posted by Jrod | living in london | trains | 8 Comments