Tonights journey home…

If you follow my twitter stream (or know me personally) you will know my journey home is a bit of a nightmare.

I catch a train from Guildford to Woking, then change for Weybridge where I watch my train pull out of the other side of the platform as the train I am on pulls in. To add insult to injury, the train from Weybridge then waits for eight minutes at Virginia Water for a faster train on the other line to overtake it. If my connection left Weybridge seven minutes later it could still be overtaken at Virginia Water, but I’d get home 30 minutes earlier….just in time to read my son a bedtime story!

Anyhow. Tonight I decided to take matters into my own hands…the first train out of Woking didn’t stop at Weybridge, but it did stop at West Byfleet. Even with my poor geography, I knew that was somewhere near the Basingstoke canal, so I thought “what the hell!”…

My plan was to try and catch my connection at Addlestone (also vaguely near the Basingstoke Canal…) by cutting off the corner.

I’d used the awesome Bike Hub app on android to check my route while waiting at Woking, so knew where I was headed.

I threw my bike onto the train, rode the one stop, and jumped off at West Byfleet.

I knew my connection left Addlestone at 18:41
My train arrived at West Byfleet at 18:27.
Bike hub reckoned out would take me 17 minutes to cycle the three miles.
I had 14 minutes.

I needed some extra juice to get me going, so jammed some Old School Prodigy on the headphones. Hit the pedals hard and off I went…

I arrived at Addlestone high street just in time to see the level crossing barriers rise…missed it by 45 seconds.

Damn.

On the plus side it was an awesome aerobic workout, I got to ride a great piece of permissive cycle path before it gets silly in the winter (cold and dark), I got rid of some pent up aggression and I felt in control of the fact I’d missed the train (as opposed to being the victim of the vagaries of South West Trains).

On the minus side I did swallow an awful lot of flies….peh!

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