Britain has become a rail replacement bus service to nowhere

Lover of a train travel adventure Will Gore finds himself caught up in a nightmare journey

The vague prospect of a late-night bus, departure time unknown, was a pretty depressing one (PA)

For every regular rail user, the words “check before you travel” are often heard but less frequently acted on. When information about times, delays and cancellations is available at the touch of a button on a phone screen, it ought perhaps to be second nature to make sure in advance that your planned journey is going to be possible. Then again, in an ideal world, it ought to be a reasonable presumption that everything will go to plan. Fat chance.

I first used railway services regularly as a student, buzzing down to the south coast every three or four weeks to visit my then girlfriend. I took real joy in those journeys, for the most part avoiding direct trains deliberately in order to introduce more changes, more jeopardy. If I could change trains at a station I’d never stopped at before, so much the better. As the son of a train obsessive, I started to wonder if I was on a slippery slope.

Occasionally, of course, things went wrong: a missed connection or a cancelled service. On the whole, though, my memories of rail travel in the late 1990s are of a system that worked pretty well and seemed to be getting better. When I moved to London at the turn of the century, catching daily overground trundlers into town from Earlsfield in zone three, the experience was again broadly positive.