To Liverpool to chair the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce, stout yeomen of the country’s small- to medium-sized businesses. I’ll let the train take the strain, I thought, and burnish my green credentials, even though I planned to travel on a Sunday, which meant the normal two-and-a-half-hour trip would take an extra hour. In fact, it was my wallet which felt the strain first: Richard Branson’s Virgin charged me £320 for the privilege of a first-class return from London, an obscene amount of money for a modest train ride. (I can fly business class to Nice and back for less!) Undaunted, I arrived at Euston in plenty of time for a 4 p.m. departure. That’s when it all went pear-shaped. The concourse was packed tight with people all staring at departure boards displaying the same word in capital letters: ‘DELAYED’ (to be strictly accurate some carried another word: ‘CANCELLED’). I made my way to what is laughingly described as Virgin’s first-class lounge, a dreary, scruffy room which was rapidly turning into the Black Hole of Calcutta as delayed passengers accumulated.
I inquired how long the delay to Liverpool would be. ‘No idea, sir’ was the polite but uninformative reply. I stood against a wall for 20 minutes (there was no place to sit — even floor space was at a premium). Nothing was moving. I could be here all night, I thought, might as well drive. So I jumped in a taxi and returned home. I’d spent £40 on taxi fares to get back to where I started. But it proved to be the right decision. I made it to Liverpool in my small but speedy BMW Mini Cooper in three and a half hours, with only the usual delays around Birmingham, checking into, while it was still daylight, the Liverpool Malmaison.
Driving turned out to be as fast as the Sunday train service — in fact, it turned out to be a lot faster for I learned later that my train, when it eventually departed, took seven hours, trundling like some magical mystery tour round Middle England to avoid repair work on the track and power cuts.
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