A friend was travelling to Chingford by train yesterday afternoon, and
asked me if there was a way to get there without "going all the way into
London, then back out again".

I think what they had in mind was some cross(ing) the country route,
from perhaps Broxbourne and approaching from the north. But there's
never been one of those.

It's worse than that, because works at Cambridge South meant that for
the umpteeth weekend running, OJPs were offering a marathon trip via
Cambridge North, <bus> Royston, Finsbury Park, and Walthamstow Central;
about three hours 15 minutes.

Last weekend someone took a similar trip, but they'd "run out of buses"
at Cambridge North and hence were an hour late getting to Central London
as a result. (And coming back, at Royston there was a queue of about 200
people in the open air for buses to Cambridge central.)

So I offered to give them a lift to Audley End, from where there were
services to Liverpool St - changes at Tottenham Hale and Walthamstow.
Unsure why the OJP not offering a routing via Cambridge North and a bus
to Audley End, but at a quick glance perhaps because that bus is
scheduled to take a little over an hour for the 21 miles.

I'm glad we checked the time, just before we left, because it turns out
all the trains were cancelled from Bishops Stortford to Audley End "due
to a points failure". But that also meant we were running late, because
Bishops Stortford is noticeably (11 miles) further.

The icing on the cake: we discovered the road from the M11 to central
Bishops Stortford is closed for its own engineering works (for a month
apparently).

Anyway, by the time we got there, the former Audley End trains were
additionally being cancelled all the way from Broxbourne to Bishops
Stortford (same excuse), but at least there were Stansted Express trains
running.

Apart from the fact that dropping people off at the airport is a
nightmare, maybe we should have been aiming for there instead.

[I'm going to Loughborough tomorrow, and will be driving!]
--
Roland Perry

On Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:01:03 +0000, Roland Perry <roland@perry.uk>
wrote:

(Long RP tale of woe snipped)

I do wish you'd let us know in advance when you're travelling so we
can change our plans accordingly. I do wonder sometimes whether there
really is some sort of deity who spends its time exacting petty
revenge against its enemies, which seem to include you.

I travelled south from Stortford yesterday and had no problems. I used
the Stratford stopper which terminates at Stortford in any case but
there was no disruption further north other than the planned closure
apparent. I assume you travelled later in the day.

But you're right about the road disruption in Bishop's Stortford. Even
when open (and tomorrow's planned reopening is postponed) access to
that road has been limited. Attempts to get out of Stortford to the
M11 are thwarted by an inability to turn right at the A120,
necessitating a 2-mile double back which is normally congested. This
is causing several hounded vehicles a day to cut through my village
which has a narrow lane with blind bends with parked vehicles.

These roadworks, associated with M11 J8, have been going on for over a
year and are nowhere near completion.

In message <pe56mihjrqmjvfhnajpah8jvraa36tlr9g@4ax.com>, at 10:04:36 on
Sun, 26 Nov 2023, Ken <ken@birchanger.com> remarked:
>On Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:01:03 +0000, Roland Perry <roland@perry.uk>
>wrote:
>
>(Long RP tale of woe snipped)
>
>I do wish you'd let us know in advance when you're travelling so we
>can change our plans accordingly. I do wonder sometimes whether there
>really is some sort of deity who spends its time exacting petty
>revenge against its enemies, which seem to include you.

Either I (and my visitors) have bad luck, or it's like this a lot of the
time but nobody else takes the trouble to document it.

And much of it is simply bad planning - the train from London [where we
had to go that day, ignoring the cut-and-paste "why don't you travel a
different day", because we had theatre tickets booked three months ago]
was an 8-car full and standing from Kings Cross (~360 seats), just
because of the time of day. It's reasonable to expect most of those
people to be going to Cambridge or beyond (it was non-stop to Royston,
and not many people live there).

Another problem is that Great Northern claim all their RRB are
accessible, but on the Cambridge North shuttle at least, they were
using standard single decker tour coaches. From that train there were
approx 1.5 coach-full going to Cambridge North, so the bulk of people
were going on different buses to Cambridge Central.

>I travelled south from Stortford yesterday and had no problems. I used
>the Stratford stopper which terminates at Stortford in any case but
>there was no disruption further north other than the planned closure
>apparent. I assume you travelled later in the day.

According to RTT, the last train to leave Audley End was the 13:19, and
the first to resume service was the 19:19 [it's half hourly]. You'd
think they'd place a bit more urgency on fixing those points, or
clipping them and working out whether they could use a different set
(they never said *where* the points in question were).

>But you're right about the road disruption in Bishop's Stortford. Even
>when open (and tomorrow's planned reopening is postponed)

Yes, I saw online earlier, it was supposed to be finished this weekend.
But we had a similar scenario on the Ely bypass earlier in the year.
Every time a long period of temporary lights was due to finish, they
simply added another few weeks to the timeline. I think it was
eventually about three months late.

>access to that road has been limited. Attempts to get out of Stortford
>to the M11 are thwarted by an inability to turn right at the A120,
>necessitating a 2-mile double back which is normally congested. This is
>causing several hounded vehicles a day to cut through my village which
>has a narrow lane with blind bends with parked vehicles.

On the way back to the A11/A14 I ended up on the old-road through the
villages. Just following the satnav, guv. I had planned on there being
plenty of time to get back home by 6pm, to give a different person a
lift somewhere. But being delayed by all this, they had to get a taxi.
I'm almost tempted to put the cost of that down as a consequential
expense on a delay-repay claim for the original cancelled Audley End to
Bishops Stortford train.

>These roadworks, associated with M11 J8, have been going on for over a
>year and are nowhere near completion.

--
Roland Perry