The day I almost lost faith in humanity

On Thursday I had to go to London to meet up with Carnival cruises and some of the other Carnival Families for afternoon tea. This meant catching a train from Manchester and back again. Unfortunately the back again bit ended up being a bit longer than expected and that evening I almost lost faith in humanity.

I have always been a bit of a mother hen, wanting to ensure that everyone gets home safe before I even consider going home myself which was how I found myself waving off the last of the Carnival Family bloggers in Kings Cross Station. They had all now got on their trains and it was finally time for me to make my way to Euston to return home. I normally check the train times and to see if everything was running smoothly on my way to the station but seen as I was walking between Kings Cross and Euston I didnt stop to check. When I arrived at Euston I should have known that something was wrong straight away by the amount of people who were waiting but I put it down to people waiting for the first off peak train so that they could get home on the cheaper ticket. I knew I still had 20 minutes or so until my train so I didnt look at the boards and instead headed straight for the toilet as all the coffee from Afternoon tea had caught up with me. 

As I came back out of the bathroom I looked up at my nearest information board and saw that every single train showed as delayed. I knew then that something was really wrong and stood waiting for an announcement. It wasn’t long before we were informed of an emergency situation on the line in Cheddington which is on the main west coast line out of Euston. As I travel a lot I knew that this meant just one thing, someone had been hit by a train and we were not going to go anywhere fast. I made a quick decision to abandon my plans to go home and headed towards my mums in Slough. This meant catching the underground to Paddington and then a train to Slough.

As I walked through the station towards the underground I heard lots of comments coming from different directions, comments saying that whoever had caused the delay had better be dead, how selfish could they be jumping in front of a train at rush hour, I even heard one person asking about compensation for the delayed train (which at that point was only 10 minutes delayed!). I saw lots of angry faces, people so wrapped up in their world that they didn’t stop to think what might have caused that poor person to decide that they wanted to commit suicide by train. I couldn’t wait to get out of the crush of overwhelming anger and selfishness that was Euston station.

Once on the train at Paddington I checked the train times and actually saw I could connect with a train at Reading that would take me all the way home to Manchester, I would get home at midnight instead of my original arrival time of just past nine oclock but atleast I would get home that night. I decided that it would be a good time to check twitter and catch up on what was happening on the trains from Euston and just felt more despair as people tweeted  the most horrendous things.  One tweet stated

There was also news of police involvement at the station due to the crowds and the mob mentality that seemed to be passing through them. Complaints about the service and the lack of trains leaving the station seemed to be getting worse and more and more people headed towards the station on their way home. Even when the trains from Euston started moving there were those complaining they had to stand on a packed train as there were not any seats available.  There was a serious lack of perspective going on and my faith in humanity was slowly ebbing away. 

I decided to close social media and proceeded to start reading my kindle, disappearing into a world inside my book. My train was slow, stopping at lots of stations on the way home but every now and then I would capture a snippet of conversation. It seemed I was not the only one on this train carriage who should have travelled from Euston. There was one lady who was on the phone thanking someone for helping out with the kids seen as she was unable to get back in time due to the problems. There was a gentlemen having a conversation with a younger women who was thanking him for helping her work out an alternative route to get home after her train was cancelled. There were people all around me who were helping each other instead of complaining. 

It seems that those few people mean that I haven’t completely lost faith in humanity but I wish that humanity could think of others more than they think of themselves because then the world would be a much nicer place and instead of thinking about the fact that you may be late getting home think about the poor person who will never be going home again and that persons family who will be receiving news that no one ever wants to receive.