My journey started at Corby railway station when Richard dropped me off before he went onto something quite specialist. This is definitely rail progress for the town, there was a station built here in 1879, but that was closed in 1966. This was clearly a ludicrous decision and it left Corby without a rail link (one of the biggest towns in the country with no railway station), until wiser heads prevailed and this station was opened in 2009, bringing the railways back to the town.
Although not the most decadent of railway stations, and there’s only one platform, the train I needed to get me into St. Pancras arrived on time.
The East Midlands Railways train isn’t the most exciting, there are no power points and they’ve shoved five seats across which really doesn’t work. The guard made an announcement that due to train cancellations this service would be very busy towards London, but, fortunately, it wasn’t too bad at all.
We arrived into St. Pancras on time, although it was all a bit chaotic on the platform as they had passengers waiting for two trains and it took over five minutes to get to the ticket barrier.
One quick underground journey on the Victoria Line between King’s Cross St Pancras and Victoria. Fortunately, this service was operating as usual, although the Piccadilly Line was closed.
This is the Southern Railways train to Gatwick Airport, which despite being 12 coaches long was packed by the time we left London. There are some bus replacement services on the other line into Gatwick, so sensible passengers switched to this route. As a positive point, there were at least power points on this train.
There was an incident on the train when a passenger pressed an emergency alarm in the toilet and the driver made three announcements calling for the guard before announcing he would stop the train if the situation wasn’t resolved. It was unclear to me what the guard was doing, but the train was split into separate units so if the guard was in the bit at the back, it might have been rather more challenging to resolve the situation.
After a quick change at Gatwick Airport, I boarded another service to Brighton. The efficiency of the services meant, to my slight disappointment, that there was no Delay Repay…..
Into Brighton railway station and it’s all happening now….