I was supposed to be at the Rocket League LAN this weekend
As a spectator, to be clear.
Myself and some workmates are big enough fans of the game to go see it live - it's a great time, I get to hang out with a group of people who live hundreds of miles away and take part in what is undeniably a fantastic crowd experience.
It was going to be my third RLCS LAN (after the RLCS S5 Finals in 2018 and the London Major in 2024) and my second with this group, but unfortunately trains in the UK are absolute dogshit these days.
This is the second cross-border trip I've planned in the last year that has been killed within 50 miles of my house. Hell, last time I didn't even make it to the train station a 5 minute walk from home before my (only possible) train got cancelled.
This one was weird though - I was checking trains all morning, everything was fine - I had a 30 minute transfer in Edinburgh which seemed reasonable, got a bite of lunch and a coffee and sat down to learn my train to Birmingham was 45 minutes late. This is annoying but workable, so I eat my meal-deal and watch some of the RLCS matches happening, get myself in the mood for the 6 hours of travel ahead of me.
Then I get a notification telling me that part of my trip has been cancelled - part of it? It's a train journey, how does part of it get cancelled? Turns out they decided to skip a handful of stops (to make up time? idk it'd let them skip Birmingham entirely) including the one I needed. I could harp on for ages about the logistics here (and I did in a previous draft, before even I was rolling my eyes at myself) but in the end I decided not to go, and headed back home for a long weekend watching the Rocket League.
It might seem like a rash, tantrum-y decision but I had one really good reason - my stop was the fucking Airport station. If they're cancelling the airport station on a long-distance train, something's fucked and that 45 minutes is just the beginning of the delays. Add to that a generally knocked confidence in the trains today, and I just didn't fancy being stranded somewhere in the west midlands without dinner.
I was vindicated in the end, the train is running 90 minutes behind, and I'd be getting into Birmingham way too late to get any kind of food or drink where I'd be staying.
This is kind of a strange post for me - really just a rant about a bad public transport experience, the most common rant imaginable. But there was a time not that long ago that this degree of failure felt anomolous, worthy of comment. I used to rely heavily on these London-Scotland trains multiple times a year, and I had only 1 event remotely comparable to this - and that one still got me where I was going within a couple hours of scheduled, I just had to stand for the 5 hour trip.
God I miss being young enough that standing for 5 hours was a minor compromise.
It feels like trains have purposely been made worse to justify shitting on them as a mode of transport. They feel actively hampered by their status as the obvious way to go from city-to-city, this politically convenient demonstration of the failure of public services (while being run by private companies, mind you) that everyone agrees are dogshit and need optimised.
I still believe trains are the best way to travel any significant distance within the UK, but for my next trip beyond York I'm going to have to consider flying as a much more serious option than I currently do - and I hate flying.
Oh, and insult to injury - the 45 minute train back home cost £11.20??? Daylight robbery I tell you.