So last weekend we traveled up to Nottingham for my mums 70th birthday. This involved 3 trains on the way there and 5 trains plus a tube instead of 2 trains & a tube on the way back.

Thursday we went to get the 11:06am train from Worthing to Haywards Heath. Our connection was at 11:48am with the journey being around 30 mins. Our train was 6 mins late due to signal failure down the line. Thankfully we managed to make our connection 🙂 . We arrive at St Pancras at 12:50am to get our 13:15 train to Nottingham.

Outward journey = DONE!

Monday we decided to get the train into Nottingham instead of the bus (my parents live in Long Eaton), so we caught the 11:23am train to caught our 12:32am train to London St Pancras.

While we were sitting having a coffee, we heard an announcement about a fatality somewhere, people having to divert if they want to get to Derby or further west and the 12:05pm train to London being cancelled, then anything via Leicester including our train! we had to get the 12:34pm train east to Grantham then get a train from there to London Kings Cross. Well that meant 2 London bound trains plus the people going east and getting the 12:34pm train anyways, were crammed into a 4 coach train. Luckly we got seats and it was an interesting short-ish journey.

We got to Grantham just in time to caught the 13:06pm London train but only because that was delayed by 4 mins. We had thought the journey by tube would be the worst part but in fact it was the better part of the whole journey. Getting into London a little later than planned meant we didn’t have to wait long at London Victoria for our 15:17pm train to Worthing.

The journey hasn’t finished yet!

The train wasn’t busy thankfully and we were happily traveling though Gatwick on our way home. Our train is 8 coaches long and at the stop at Haywards Heath it would divide. We traveled though Three Bridges and were not that far from our stop at Hayward Heath when we came to a stop and were told by the conductor that the train in front of us had applied it’s brakes for some reason. We sat there waiting and I joked that we would end up reversing to get round the train and then the driver just happened to walk through the train! We do end up reversing and going back to Three Bridges. The conductor told us if we were going towards Eastbourne then we were to get off and wait for announcements as the line was closed! Thankfully we were going towards Littlehampton so shortly after arriving at Three Bridges we were off on a long divertion fast to Littlehampton! We ended making an unscheduled stop along the way as someone had gotten on our train at Three Bridges thinking it was a stopper!!!

We finally get to Littlehampton around 5pm, the time we should have been home. The line by this time was now open again and our train just happened to be going the correct way by to London so we stayed on it to Worthing and got home around 6pm, 1hr later than expected.

Return journey = DONE

For some reason I wasn’t stressing about the return journey at all, maybe because we were going home, I don’t know but usually I get totally stressed out.

Once we were home we dumped our thing and headed to the pub for food and drinks!

It turns out the fatality happened in Attenbourgh involving a rail crossing and the 11:44am London bound train. That same line is the line we used less than 5 min earlier!