Pendolino
Started: 2024-09-03 19:51:43
Submitted: 2024-09-03 21:25:32
Visibility: World-readable
Taking the train down the West Coast Main Line, and meeting up with old colleagues in London
After eight days in Glasgow, starting with Worldcon and ending with a deep dive into the region's industrial history, I left the city to head to London for the weekend.
On my way out of town, before my train departed at 10:38, I picked up a couple of souvenirs at one of the many dedicated shops in central Glasgow: a few trinkets with St. Andrew's Cross on them, and a made-in-Scotland scarf with a random tartan pattern that I liked.
The 399-mile route from Glasgow Central to London Euston along the West Coast Main Line is served by one train per hour, operated by Class 390 "Pendolino" tilting trains that bank into the curves on the northern part of the route. I paid for a "premium" ticket, which looked a first-class seating arrangement (three abreast across the train) without first-class service. (I could have paid even more for proper first-class service, which I think included meal service.) The booking engine gave me check boxes to indicate whether I wanted to sit in a window or aisle seat, and whether I wanted to face forwards or backwards relative to the direction of travel. I picked a forward-facing window seat and got a seat at a four-top table in carriage H, near the front of the train.
I waited for my train at the queue forming in front of platform 1, along with other people who were clearly traveling with enough luggage for a multi-day trip in one direction or another. I found my carriage, stowed my luggage, found my seat, and settled in for the long ride to London.
The train departed right on time, accelerating smoothly on electric traction out of the platform through the station throat on the way to London. Once we were outside of Glasgow the train picked up speed and began noticeably banking into turns. Wikipedia tells me that the WCML takes a route that winds through the rolling hills in Scotland and England, allowing a maximum speed for passenger service of 110 miles per hour except for trains specifically designed to tilt to avoid jostling passengers back and forth. Looking out the train window as we approached a curve I could see the passenger carriage begin to tilt. Some of that was probably the track bed itself (up to six degrees); the train itself can tilt another eight degrees. The banking was smooth and hardly noticeable, except that I was paying attention at the right moment.
On the train I wrote a blog post about riding a Waymo in San Francisco, catching up on my backlog from before I left on my holiday in Scotland, and reading a book about Scottish history (which I apparently left on the train because it had disappeared from my laptop bag by the time I got to my hotel in London).
I watched my GPS receiver on my phone and it appeared that we spent much of the journey cruising at 110 miles per hour, though we did get up to 125 miles per hour. All of this was on a legacy rail corridor, originally built in pieces in the nineteenth century, with mixed passenger and freight traffic, which had been diligently and incrementally upgraded in the twentieth century.
As we approached London, around Milton Keynes, we were diverted to the slow tracks, causing us to arrive in London about twenty minutes later than expected. When we arrived at Euston station I picked up my luggage and disembarked from the train (walking the rest of the length of the train to exit the station) to step out onto the crowded concourse. The station concourse was packed with people, though I wasn't sure whether this was regular Friday afternoon traffic or if people were affected by the delays on the fast lines. I made my way out of the surface rail station and into the Underground station, where I caught the next northbound Northern Line train to Camden Town.
I checked into my hotel (the Holiday Inn in Camden Town, the same place I stayed five years ago when visiting my counterpart SRE team in London) and headed across the street to Mildred's (my favorite veg restaurant in London) for a very-late lunch. (I had neglected to eat anything on the train, mostly because the cafe car was all the way on the other end of the train and I kept hearing confusing messages on the PA about it being closed.)
In the evening I headed to Southwark to meet up with two old colleagues from my counterpart SRE teams in London, neither of whom I had seen for about five years. It turned out that one of the disaster projects I had left behind when I left Google four years ago remained a disaster; my team was never able to write the right production automation to move data between clusters and the whole project ended up back in the hands of the dev team. (I do not regret abandoning the project, nor do I regret taking the dev/ops slider in my life and moving it decidedly back towards "dev", but sometimes I miss playing with the scale of production infrastructure that Google was able to deploy. And also Memegen.)
