Amiens; Friday, 19 June, 2026

The journey up to St Pancras had started off relatively normally with the only difficulty being whether to change trains at Tulse Hill onto the slow Thameslink or carry on up to London Bridge and pick up the fast one there. In the end I opted to go via London Bridge as the air conditioning on the train was set to particularly pleasantly cold. It turned out that was fortuitous.

I changed trains at London Bridge and in the end, we were running a couple of minutes behind the slow train, which had already departed City Thameslink ahead of us when we pulled into Blackfriars. At this point the very earliest breaking news alerts were starting to come through that there had been a train crash further up the line near Bedford and the entire Thameslink service was being suspended.

It’s likely that if I’d been on the slower train at the very least I’d have been stuck in the tunnel outside Farringdon for a long time, or possibly reversed back into City Thameslink after a lengthy wait, instead I was able to leave the train at Blackfriars and pick up a bus to Farringdon before hopping on the tube for the one stop round to Kings Cross St Pancras, it added about 15 minutes to my journey time, but I still made it to the Eurostar terminal with plenty of time to spare.

In fact, I had way more time that even I thought as after boarding and everyone getting settled on the train the departure time came round and then passed with nothing moving. Eventually, about 10 minutes after we were supposed to depart the Train Manager announced that due to major thunderstorms rolling through Northern France the entire train network was at a stand, so we would be held at St Pancras for a while.

That ended up being a 30-minute wait before we finally got underway, and throughout the journey across Kent it was difficult to understand why we had been delayed, but by the time we popped out of the tunnel near Calais the skies made it very clear that they were not happy.

We passed through a couple of hefty showers and whilst there weren’t any actual flashes of lightning the sky looked like it would only be time before there was more, with it getting increasingly threatening as the train pulled into Lille Europe 25 minutes behind schedule.

Thankfully I’d changed the hotel that I was staying in from the one I’d been in the previous two weeks, that was a good 10 minute walk through town to one that was directly opposite the train station, so it was a less than 5 second sprint across the road to get to the shelter of the hotel, though only a couple of big spots of rain were coming down at that time.

Checked-in I headed up to my room and turned in for the night.