Hythe; Friday, 12 April, 2013

An amazingly smooth journey came to a grinding halt within touching distance of the end. The journey across London had been smooth, and I’d made the train at St Pancras with a couple of minutes to spare. Everything had been running smoothly until the train ground to a halt a couple of hundred yards from the end of Folkestone West station.

A major signal failure (which on checking later was still causing problems for the last train of the night), had taken out the signals and the train couldn’t progress any further.

After sitting there for about 15 minutes the decision was taken to reverse us back up the line to the previous station of Sandling, “detrain” us all and put us on buses.

The first element worked OK, with the train getting back into Sandling relatively easily. We all disembarked and walked to the car park for the replacement bus, at which point the guard, having checked the train was empty, got back on the train and it shot off back to Ashford leaving us all stranded.

20 minutes later there was still no sign of any replacement bus, and no sign of anyone from SouthEastern wanting to take responsibility, so I gave up and phoned for a cab.

By the time the cab arrived there still hadn’t been a bus to take people on, so I was rather glad that I’d acted unilaterally (although in the knowledge that SouthEastern were going to refuse point blank to refund me).

Having checked into the hotel and dropped my stuff off I went for a wander along the sea-front and then wandered through Hythe, partly to take in the place, and also to see if there was anywhere to get dinner.

However, just as I was starting to consider options there were the first drips of rain and a look at the sky implied that if I wanted to remain dry I might want to consider the hotel as an option.

I managed to get to within 100 yards of the hotel before the cloudburst started. Thankfully I wasn’t too soaked, but it was clear over the next couple of hours that I’d made the correct decision to eat in the hotel as the wind whipped around the hotel lashing rain in all directions.