Hello everyone!
I hope you are all doing well. Today, I had to commute to work by train. I can work from home a couple of days a week but when I have to go to work, I utilize the train. Quite some people are doing so, definitely no exception in Belgium. I guess most Belgian people have their train stories as well. So, hereby I'll tell my latest one. I could probably make a series about this topic as I have a couple of such stories. I will first see how this one goes though, step by step as they say.
It has been a couple of days qgo that it happened. I usually take a train which goes directly to the station I need to be. It makes a little detour but I don't have to change trains. This means I can just sit down and relax. Often I try to write a Hive article while I am on the train. As it's usually on my mobile phone, the lay-out is often very basic. But still, it's merely about my thoughts than about the lay-out. Atleast, that's my look on the things.
Now, about the train story. So, I was waiting for my direct train which arrived on time. That's already an accomplishment as Belgian trains don't have the image of being usually on time. But hey, so far so good. I chose an empty chair and sat down.
The train left the station on time, we left as planned. The train continued its journey, stopped as intended a couple of times and thus I was nearly halfway my trip. Sun was shining outside, it was a great morning. But than I already had the impression we were driving slowly at a piece of the traject where we normally drive steadily. As Belgian train conductors aren't always (able to) communicate well about what is going on I didn't further think about it. A couple of minutes later, we stopped at a station where he had to stop anyway. A communication was mqde: Dear travellers, there is a technical issue, we don't know if we will be able to fix it. It's maybe better to take a train backwards, to a bigger station, to continue your travel from there. As soon as I heard that, I left the train and checked when that train backwards would be there. It was in about five minutes. As I managed to leave the train among the first persons, I could hop on the other train among the first persons as well. That was my luck, as the train in the other direction wasn't that big so not everyone from the first train could hop on this train. All of this, while I could even sit down. We drove back to a previous bigger station.
In that station, I managed to take a train towards my endstation. The whole story led to a delay of over one hour and 30 minutes on a journey which normally takes about one hour and thirty minutes.
Remember that the slogan of our railwaycompany is: Taking the train is always a bit of travelling.
That's it for today, thanks for stopping by!
