Train driver forgets to stop at a station

A few years ago I was on the late night train to Vasa in Finland and it failed to stop at one of the intermediate stations on the line. By the time the passengers who wanted to get off had found the guard, it had gone many miles past the station on the single line. They backed it up though to let the people off. The train was about an hour late in Vasa.

This is one of those lines with one train a day or something?

Were you in a Scandinavian noir plot?

Lol, that's a great work story.

I travel on the Overground most days and it's so slow, I often wish the driver would miss the odd station out and just keep going. Provided it wasn't mine, obviously.

Thanks. Funnily enough that day was also the first day that a whole new computerised system was being tested and everything went wrong so that at the end of my shift no one knew where any of the trains were.

But I was enjoying myself so much that I voluntarily went Eastwards from Acton where I could have got off and did another unpaid two hours.

(I soon learnt of course )

Yeah,driving tube trains is a blast when's there's hardly any passengers

There were more trains on the line, about 4 or 5 a day, but this was the last one.



There was nothing noir about it. This was midsummer and I remember wandering the town at midnight in daylight looking for something to eat.

I always imagine it's a really awful job, especially on very busy, hot, mostly underground ones.

It often feels like there are only about 5 trains a day on many London commuter routes.

One of the things that is overlooked is how appallingly bad many rail services were in the golden age of rail.

There then were many more routes and many more stations but many of them had terrible service patterns. There might well be one train a day to Glasgow, but there would be only three or four to the nearest big town.

Take Stoke on Trent for example. In 1910 it only had 3 direct trains a day to London. By 1951 that had risen to 6. There were only 6 direct trains to Birmingham and 7 to Manchester in 1910 with similar rises to 1951. By the 1970s heyday of BR, London and Birmingham had 11 and 10 trains a day respectively and Manchester had risen to 37.

Stoke now has around 80 direct trains to London a day and around 80 to Manchester with 32 to Birmingham.

Yet Stoke in 1910 was probably more important as a place than Stoke is today and there really was no other way for Mr Wedgwood to go up to London or for his reps to get anywhere or for the Tsar's agent to come to Stoke to negotiate for a new 1000 piece tea service.

The same was true for most other places. Brighton or Cheltenham or Edinburgh might have good trains at all hours of the day or night but it is they which were the exception.

Most places, no matter how big or small, that actually have a train service, have the best service along the routes that still exist, that they have ever done.