Novice driver?
My commute into work involves the use of a very rural railway line. Two trains ply the route, much of which is single track, pass at North Walsham where there is a handy bit of doubled up track for precisely that, get to the end of the line, turn round, come back. Lather, rinse, repeat. This setup has some advantages; except for a tiny bit at the Norwich end, there is only ever one other train that can get in your way (and they can and do turf everyone off to wait for the next train and send the empty train back if things get too out of whack); similarly signal failures aren’t a massive problem as there are only 2 trains to co-ordinate; also it’s a quiet line so I always get a seat, often by myself. The downside is when things go wrong you can easily get delayed an hour waiting for the next train and if a train goes out of service all he’ll breaks loose. Especially if it breaks down on a bit of single track, unable to move so nothing can get past.
This morning the train glided [glode?] into the station without the usual rumble of it’s diesel/electric engine. This is never good. 10 seconds later there is a roar, the engine restarts, all appears to be well. 5 minutes later the engine cuts out again, we glide into Roughton Road station, I start to wonder if we’ll leave. Lo and behold the engine restarts, big roar, we pull off…
200 meters outside of Gunton engine dies. Coast in. Restart…
And so on at every station. Most disconcerting. So the question is was this a defective train which limped from Cromer to Norwhich; a novice driver who kept stalling the engine; or some new operating procedure to save money?
It was with some trepidation I left the office this afternoon and checked the train times. I had visions of a failed train blocking the line, or one train out of service meaning chaos and me getting home late. Thankfully all appears to be working fine. The train has arrived, the engine is running and (touch wood) in 45 minutes or so it’ll disgorge me onto Cromer station, platform 1.