What I did on my holidays, 11 – the voyage home

A short post to finish off the account of the Austrian trip.

We had the benefit of a 9:15 departure from Ulm on a stopping train to Stuttgart. As our hotel didn’t do breakfasts, and time was of the essence, I was planning on either grabbing something at the station, or (Plan B) waiting until we got on board the Paris train at Stuttgart. As you might imagine, Stuff Happened and we were onto Plan B. I’d always thought that Germans started work early, but the train to Stuttgart was busy; but well-organised enough not to be burdensome.

Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof was heaving, but we came upon our Paris train only a few platforms away from our arrival road, before we could get to the concourse and the departure board for all the services. So that worked well enough, and our reserved seats were easily found. We pulled out of Stuttgart in good time, and I went to the buffet car to get breakfast.

Which was as well. We’d been seeing news reports for a few days about the disruption to air traffic across Europe following the failure of the UK’s air traffic control system. (Which turned out to be due to a one-in-a-million combination of bad data and a system not configured to handle it elegantly. An instance of “we stop testing when the project manager tells us to so the application can be deployed, knowing that there will be undetected bugs that will hopefully never show up because they will depend on very rare combinations of circumstances”). We rolled into Karlsruhe to a huge crowd on the platform who proceeded to pack themselves onto our train, standing all the way down the aisles as well as occupying the coach vestibules.

The train manager went spare. Within five minutes, he’d made an announcement (in German) to the effect that the train was dangerously overcrowded, that people who did not have a reserved seat on that service should get off and present themselves at the travel centre, where they would be booked onto the next available train; and that our train would not be departing until this happened.

No-one moved.

After about twenty minutes, he repeated the announcement in German and French. Still no-one moved. After another twenty minutes, he repeated his announcement, this time in German, French and English. Strangely enough, the crowd began to thin out, and inside five minutes we were on our way again. Whether his language skills had had an impact, or the arrival of two armed Politzei on the platform had concentrated minds I cannot say.

By this time, we were some forty-five minutes late, but at least the sun had finally come out (as it usually does on a wet holiday when you’re finally heading home). I wasn’t worried because we had a generous cushion of time between arrival at Paris Gare de l’Est and departure from Paris Gare du Nord, two stations very close together. I was particularly taken by our journey between Strasbourg and Paris. When I last made this journey by rail in 1997, Strasbourg to Paris took more than four hours; our high-speed service covered the distance in about an hour and twenty minutes, and we recovered about ten minutes of the time we had lost.

In Paris, we felt the need to take a taxi between stations, much to the incredulity of the taxi driver who had not noticed that one of us was walking with a stick. The queues for the Eurostar was remarkable, given that it was a Wednesday afternoon, though again there was probably increased demand because of the non-availability of flights; the walking stick came in handy again, as that promoted us to the head of the various queues, and without effort we were soon through check-in, French customs and UK border control and sitting in the Eurostar lounge watching people rushing to get their trains.

Paris Gare du Nord

In due course it was our turn; we travelled back through the Channel tunnel and arrived at St. Pancras International; and then transferred to an East Midlands Railway Voyager for the trip back to Leicester. On the way, my friend asked “What’s powering this train?”. “Diesel” I replied.

“Ah, diesel,” she said. “How quaint.”

St. Pancras International

Previously: Days 10 & 11, Ulm