Planes, trains and automobiles... and buses

I have vowed never again to travel from Oxford to London by train. Due to a tunnel collapse at Gerrard's Cross (Tesco's began building a new store on it without anybody checking if the tunnel could take the weight - it couldn't) all trains between Banbury (a town about 15 miles north of Oxford) and London have to be diverted - the result being that a one hour journey has become a two hour journey. Even though the Banbury to London train takes a different line, it has affected the Oxford to London trains as well; i.e. made a crap service even worse.

A few weeks ago, having been out on the town to celebrate some friends' birthdays, my sister and I get to London Paddington station at about 11.00pm, safe in the knowledge that there will be a few more trains back to Oxford and Banbury before the last one at half past midnight. Except there were no trains. The best we could do was get a train to a little place called Didcot Parkway and then get a bus the rest of the way back to Oxford. Upshot is that a one-hour journey took over three hours and my sister and I didn't get back to my place until 3.00am.

So, last Wednesday I got the bus, the confusingly named Oxford Tube that, despite the allusion to London's underground train network, is not a train and does not go underground. It has much in its favour over the train services between Oxford and the capital:

• return tickets are half the price
• departures are about every fifteen minutes - the longest you'll ever have to wait for the next one is an hour between 3.00 and 4.00 in the morning so that's hardly a problem
• the seats are more comfortable
• everything is cleaner
  

The only drawback is that your journey will take between half an hour to forty-five minutes longer, depending on the traffic... and that is comparing travel time with a train that is not delayed, a rare thing indeed.

Screw the rail network.