I could walk 500 miles...

The Proclaimers can still get the crowd going, as they showed at the Cambridge Folk Festival this summer.

3 out of 4 ain't bad: I went to London on Friday and Saturday. All 4 trains were punctual (the 15:15 Cambridge - 16:03 KX on Friday), and on both evenings the 23:15 KX - 00:13 Cambridge trains ran on time. The only notably unpleasant journey was the 11:01 Cambridge - 12:13 KX. This is what wagn put us through on Saturday morning:
- 3 of the 4 ticket machines were not working. As usual, the 3 credit card machines were out of order, but no-one had bothered even to put a sign, so everyone was trying to use them and finding nothing was happening. It occurs to me that perhaps there is some institutional unwillingness to move customers on to buying their tickets from machines. After all there might be fewer jobs. My partner pointed out that it would be worth keeping an IT person on the station. I pointed out that it would be worth having SEVERAL there : if there is a queue for hours, then the time wasted over that time is the time the queue exists multiplied by the average number of people in the queue!! More on this another time.
- we'd arrived to try to get the 10:45 to London. My stress-level while queuing (after 10 minutes we managed to buy tickets by 10:40, so would have been OK) evaporated somewhat when I realised that in fact there was no 10:45. The fast (~50 mins) trains from Cambridge to London are not running at weekends between mid-September and mid-December. What have wagn done in terms of replacement? Slightly slower trains at the same time (taking the "Hatfield loop"). No, no problem, we can all just jam onto the stopping services at 11:01 (1 hr 15 mins) and 11:31 (1hr 9 mins). So the 11:01 on Saturday morning was jam-packed, embarrassingly with many overseas students and other foreign visitors.
- and what's more, the heating in our part of the train was turned much too high. Is there some law of physics - omitted from my school curriculum - that means thermostats do not work on trains?

This is turning into an epic, but what I wanted to write about was wagn's habit, which seems new to me, of using the station as a marshalling yard. So not only did both trains arrive at platforms 9 and 10 at KX, a long walk to the underground entrance in the main foyer (can we have a tunnel, please, ... with moving walkway - having an "Oliver!" moment here: "you want more? MORE?"), we also had to walk by 4 carriages that were just left there all day. I timed this walk at over 1 minute on Saturday morning. So if just 1000 people have to walk past the carriages left on a platform, over 1000 person-minutes are lost. That is, over 16 hours. And the real number is probably much higher. So, looking at the system as a whole, it would be worth employing 2 people for an entire day to move these carriages! But wagn don't see the whole picture. They just steal this time from the travelling public and hope they don't notice. Well, I've begun to notice, as what with queuing for tickets, cuts and slower services, and this sort of casual inconveniencing, my journeys are taking longer and longer.