2 days ago saw the start of the 2013 gala season on heritage railways with the great central railway kicking things off in real style. star visiting engine was 6023 supported by visiting engine 3803 a great western 2-8-0 freight engine both these engines worked faultlessly throughout my visit on the 26th with other engines such as 46521, 78019, 777 sir lamiel, 48624, 47406 & 1744 thrown in the mix proved to be a real gala success for variety and performance with turntable, freight and tpo demonstrations running with passenger trains to give a real western/midland region mix on this as usual fantastic gala event
unfortunately my return journey home was absolutely shocking, got into leicester from loughborough no problems (thanks east midland trains for a good journey) but when i got to leicester i found a late running cross country turbo star so got on board only to be waiting a further hour before they decided to put everyone onto replacement busses, there were 2 train loads of passengers on 3 busses which were stuffy, hot and generally made everyone sick. the cause of such an awful farce was that the entire line between peterborough and whittlesea died, why they couldn't make the turbostar trapped at peterborough form a new service to birmingham then send out train to peterborough i'll never know. to make things worse i lost my monopod either on the train or on the replacement bus and one month after this incident i've still not heard anything back from cross country trains about this. good performance great central railway, absolutely poor from cross country
unfortunately my return journey home was absolutely shocking, got into leicester from loughborough no problems (thanks east midland trains for a good journey) but when i got to leicester i found a late running cross country turbo star so got on board only to be waiting a further hour before they decided to put everyone onto replacement busses, there were 2 train loads of passengers on 3 busses which were stuffy, hot and generally made everyone sick. the cause of such an awful farce was that the entire line between peterborough and whittlesea died, why they couldn't make the turbostar trapped at peterborough form a new service to birmingham then send out train to peterborough i'll never know. to make things worse i lost my monopod either on the train or on the replacement bus and one month after this incident i've still not heard anything back from cross country trains about this. good performance great central railway, absolutely poor from cross country
