Friday 30 March 2007

Endless Endless Engineering Works

Moving on from the poster competition, it's back to business as normal at the Girl on a Train blog. Thankyou for your contributions, I suppose as Blue is disqualified and I am the host, that makes Daniel the winner. Congratulations, you have won this prestigious competition, your poster shall form the epitome of the South West Trains campaign against Bag Morons, perhaps.

So, back to business.

The trains are making front-page news in the local papers relentlessly at the moment. I would never have thought it would be such a gigantic storyline – trains are something that we all know are there but don’t really talk much about in person (in blogs, well that’s another matter!)

Some people’s lives appear to be being devastated by engineering works happening around our area. It’s a typical engineering works saga actually. They say to the customer from the start, ‘oh don’t worry, it won’t take long and will not cause any disruption, or at least, if it does, the disruption will be minimal.’

5 weeks later and they admit that they aren’t to schedule at all.

Another month later and they confess that, actually, they have no idea when the engineering works will finish.

So it has turned from 5 weeks of minimal work to a mammoth job of god-knows how long.

Well, personally, it doesn’t really bother me much. I can still take my train to work and (normally) get there in reasonable time.

However, some poor sods who live near the train tracks are finding their lives ruined by this mess. A lot of engineering works goes on during the nighttime, when there are no trains running. But this keeps people awake all night long with the sounds of heavy machinery and shouting from the site staff. Poor them. I feel for them, actually.

I just hope they get some sort of fair compensation for the hassle.

4 comments:

Soup said...

My line is about to be affected starting Easter. In a bid to not have to get a 6am train, I am taking holiday for the time period that they claim it will take. But you any money it overruns and I am getting 6am trains for at least a week after.

:( meh. Can't wait to move!

Anonymous said...

I have a friend who lives in Basingstoke, so that's her track ripped up! :(

Unknown said...

Thats me !

Yeah im off back to Basingstoke tommorow... Long live the engineering works lol

Anonymous said...

lol let me guess you live in Portsmouth as those engineering works have been going on for about 5 months now (overrun by 3½ months), but that area doesnt affect me - apart from im going to Portsmouth on the 21st