Britain has become a rail replacement bus service to nowhere

Lover of a train travel adventure Will Gore finds himself caught up in a nightmare journey

The vague prospect of a late-night bus, departure time unknown, was a pretty depressing one (PA)

For every regular rail user, the words “check before you travel” are often heard but less frequently acted on. When information about times, delays and cancellations is available at the touch of a button on a phone screen, it ought perhaps to be second nature to make sure in advance that your planned journey is going to be possible. Then again, in an ideal world, it ought to be a reasonable presumption that everything will go to plan. Fat chance.

I first used railway services regularly as a student, buzzing down to the south coast every three or four weeks to visit my then girlfriend. I took real joy in those journeys, for the most part avoiding direct trains deliberately in order to introduce more changes, more jeopardy. If I could change trains at a station I’d never stopped at before, so much the better. As the son of a train obsessive, I started to wonder if I was on a slippery slope.

Occasionally, of course, things went wrong: a missed connection or a cancelled service. On the whole, though, my memories of rail travel in the late 1990s are of a system that worked pretty well and seemed to be getting better. When I moved to London at the turn of the century, catching daily overground trundlers into town from Earlsfield in zone three, the experience was again broadly positive.

A few times during those years, I faced the inevitable hassle of a rail replacement bus service. Back then, I never checked before I travelled, so the buses would always come as a surprise: not exactly a welcome one, but in my life before children, modest delays rarely seemed to matter much. If a bus turned up instead of a train, it just added to the adventure.

And anyway, for the most part the switch from rail to road seemed to be the result of engineering works, necessary for upgrading the line. While the danger of rose-tinted spectacles may be obvious, there did seem to be a sense that occasional disruption was a fair price to pay for a system on the up. When rail replacement buses were required, they had usually been pre-planned and were waiting in neat rows in station car parks, ready to disperse passengers elsewhere.

This week I had a very different experience, arriving at London Euston at 10.30pm to find no trains running beyond Watford. I had not, it is fair to note, checked before I travelled. But still, for the purposes of getting home, there were not many alternatives. A guard on the platform told me not to worry though: there were buses from Watford to Hemel Hempstead, and from there, more trains.

That information turned out to be incorrect. Instead, at Watford, three or four harassed staff were desperately trying to work out where dozens of passengers wanted to get to. Some were heading only a few miles up the line; one man asked hopefully about Coventry. Another, also bound for a long journey, asked if the station staff could guarantee that everyone would get home; he received no guarantee, but in fairness, the poor bloke trying to organise the chaos wasn’t sure he’d be getting home himself.

On the face of it, the disruption was a consequence of damage caused by the intense heat of the preceding two days. But the whole thing seemed to have been a botched exercise. Information was sketchy to non-existent. It felt like this was a service on its knees already, brought to a new low by matters beyond its control, but unable to respond with anything other than panic.

Remarkably, the anger among passengers was largely kept under wraps: the group was resigned to its fate, as if it was an all too familiar experience. Even for me, lover of a railway adventure, the vague prospect of a late-night bus, departure time unknown, was a pretty depressing one. After an hour we were finally herded onto a coach, destined, it seemed, for every station between Watford and Northampton. By the time I got home, I had spent three hours travelling 30 miles.

In post-Brexit, post(ish)-pandemic, high-inflation, rudderless Britain, my journey on Wednesday evening felt emblematic. At least I knew where I was heading. At the moment, there seems little point in checking before the country travels on, when no one seems to know the direction in which it’s going.