Another trip, another train. Heading to north Wales via public transport on an August Bank Holiday Saturday. A momentary lapse of reason. I’d arrived in Crewe relatively unscathed along a pleasant branch line from our friends place in Whaley Bridge. But stepping off the train from Stockport and shuffling over to Platform 11, I realised my miscalculation. Twenty minutes before the Holyhead departure, holidaymakers were already four or five deep by the gangways, sporting an assortment of bikes, double buggies, surf-boards, fishing gear, suitcases, holdalls... Coronavirus might have significantly impacted commuter journeys during 2020, but once restrictions were lifted on UK holidays, people were not waiting for a second chance to hit the coast. I hadn’t entirely seen this coming. The empty train pulled in to the platform firing the starting gun for a scramble to get on board. Within a couple of minutes all the seats and vestibules were overflowing. The train manager was prowling
I’d already been travelling for a couple of hours, but the journey only felt like it was properly beginning as we left Shrewsbury. Something to do with the train reversing out of the junction station in the direction it had entered. As if a newly configured service. Where once I had been sat in the front two coaches, as the electronic signage had directed me at the newly rebuilt Birmingham New Street, I was now in the rear two. And on the wrong side for the view of sweeping coastline that I was keenly anticipating from my carefully chosen window seat. Not long out of the station, we skirted the Shrewsbury signal box on the opposite side to my arrival a few minutes earlier. Not just any old junction control housing, though. This was the largest working mechanical signal box in the world. Oh yes. The conductor appeared. This proved to be the catalyst for a passenger migration only surpassed by the partition of India. Slightly fewer fatalities, in truth. Every time the portly conduct