“Travel” in London
I was in London last week to do some work and had one day of hell commuting. There was about one inch of snow when I woke up on Thursday morning. Not that much, really considering the weather forecasters had predicted the haviest snow fall for seven years the previous night. Anyway, I walked to the bus stop; traffic seemed to be moving normally as the roads were clear. I caught a bus to the railway station - so far so good, I thought. I caught a train straight in to Paddington. What was all the fuss about? I got to Paddington and headed for the tube to travel to the office. The tube station was closed!! Apparently most of the lines were closed due to signalling problems. 
I headed for the Hammersmith and City line which was still open, but the platorm was absolutely bunged; I had to wait for people to get off the stairs before I could get down to the platform. Obviously everyone else had had the same idea! I could see that there was little hope in me getting a train into the centre as the platform was about 10 people deep, so I caught the next outgoing train and got off at Royal Oak and switched platforms to catch the next ingoing train. Sardines at Paddington! I squeezed off the train at Baker Street and headed for the Jubilee line which was still running. However, when I got to the ticket hall there were literally over a thousand people waiting to get down to the platform. The helpful chap from London Underground explained that there were a further two thousand people waiting on the platform down below, and that we could be waiting “up to an hour” before we would be let down. Sod that! I thought and headed for the Jubilee northbound which ws still open thinking I could do the same as I had at Paddington. Anyway, I got down the stairs and saw a sign saying Jubilee line Southbound. Headed for that and walked straight out on to the platform (it wasn’t that crowded) and caught the next train within a couple of minutes. All in all the journey had taken anout two hours.
I flew back to Barcelona that evening, but again there were problems: Heathrow terminal 2 had suffered a power failure earlier in the day, so there was a huge backlog in people getting X-rayed for security - it took over an hour from the back of the queue (which wound all the way to arrivals and back to departures and then out of the building down a long corridor) to finally getting in to the departures area. When I landed back home at Barcelona I had a sense of relief that I was getting back to civilization and to some working public transport. I’ve no idea what would happen to transport if it ever snowed in Barcelona, but I have a feeling that they would cope much better…
End of moan…
