Quote ="King Street Cat"The last train out of Leeds to Sheffield on a Saturday night is EXACTLY the same, yet it still turns up every week with the same old two carriages and the station staff have the same problem of too many drunks trying to get on not enough carriages. I always try to get the one before the last as it's a slightly more pleasurable experience.
Now that the German Christmas market is running in Leeds the last train becomes pretty much a no go area. I've caught it a few times when a gig has run over and missed the previous train. The sick and the dying all slumped in seats, covered from head to toe in scraps of fast food, alpha males giving it the big one to get the extra carriage round as quick as possible, there's always a couple or if you're lucky (or unlucky) two couples who have been out all day and have realised that they actually hate each other's company, and then there's the token annoying guy who's realised this is a 'situation' and needs to put himself onto everyone to have a good time, he's a kind of living Keep Calm and Carry On poster but with bad dress sense and 8 pints in him. It's what I imagine the last train out of a nuclear dystopia to be like. Hell.'"
I went through a phase a couple of years ago of catching the Leeds/Birmingham x-Country service quite frequently which involved me having to catch the 7am-ish local shunter service into Leeds from where I live, its only three stops up the line but in all the times I had to use it I never got a seat, in fact I never got more than three yards into the carriage, would hate to have to use that service every day.
I'd been insulated from the horrors of local train journeys on the X-Country service where I always had a reserved seat etc, but someone in the office once booked me onto a return journey that wasn't going through Leeds, it involved a change at Sheffield and just before that stop the guard advised that a local service was waiting on the next platform to take us on to Leeds - was just about to get on that when the guard of that local train asked if we (about 20 of us) really wanted to take that service when if we waited for 20 minutes another X-Country train would be along, our tickets were valid for it and we'd be in Leeds long before this local service would be - then he showed us the running order for his train - it was going to Leeds via every stop in the five towns area and was scheduled as a 90 minute journey time - I could have walked to Leeds quicker.
