Train Collision: One Dead
I travelled with Ben, a fellow member of Neath Port Talbot Youth Council, to Birmingham for a residential with PLAnet (I will be submitting an article all about PLAnet and how you can get involved soon, so don’t get caught up in the confusion of what PLAnet is about) which ended in catastrophe.
The young people attending the residential consisted of different age groups ranging from 13 – 24 from all over the UK. All in all, the residential was a great laugh, and very informative. Everybody took home a new skill, no doubt about it!
We stayed at NASUWT's Teachers Union Headquarters in Birmingham, which was very swish. The journey to Birmingham from Port Talbot was fine, no hiccups or mishaps, but it was a very different story for the return journey home.
Everyone said their goodbyes, dished out hugs departed in taxis from the accommodation to Barnt Green train station. Everyone except Ben and myself were making their train changes at Birmingham New Street. We were to change over at Birmingham University.
We decided to take an earlier train, making us ten minutes ahead of our journey plan. We got to our station safely, and boarded our connection train to Newport.
All was well until half an hour into our journey when there is a sudden stop. We were stationary for half hour and were wondering what was happening. Then, it was announced that a pheasant had flown into our train, and because both bird and train were travelling at such high speeds, it had smashed the windscreen, leaving us to retrace our journey back to New Street to change trains. This caused us to miss all of our connections, while the pheasant had experienced a horrific death.
To add to all this, I realised when I got off the train in Newport that my brand new Blackberry was still on the train! We knew that the train was terminating at Cardiff Central, so we caught a train to Cardiff and rang my phone, in hope that some kind person had found it. Luckily for me, they had. A man answered and said that he’d hand it in to the ticket office. I was delighted but at the same time, I wasn’t very happy at the fact that we were hours behind schedule!
The moral of this story is life is like dominoes. Every decision affects another, from changing our minds to taking an early train can all lead to us being hours late. Also, glue your precious Blackberry to your hand!
What a day!
