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A friend of mine is coming over to visit, among other things to go see Porcupine Tree live in concert, which i’m really looking forward to. Flight booked. Sorted. Well, almost. Problem is, it seems that it isn’t so easy to get from East Midlands Airport, located more or less in central England to the ‘fine city’ of Norwich, on the East coast. A total distance of around 160 miles (250km).

His planned Journey will begin from Stockholm at around 11am, arriving in the U.K. at around 1.30pm. Conveniently, there’s no train station at East Midlands Airport. He does however, have the mouth-watering choice of 3 buses to the nearby cities of Leicester, Loughborough and Nottingham, which do have train stations. After some painstaking investigation of reasonable intellectual effort (anyone who’s tried to use thetrainline.com will know why), it seems that it’s easiest to get to Norwich from Leicester, a 50 minute bus ride from the Airport. Progress. Except, that the bus doesn’t drop-off at the train station. No, that’d be too simple. It plonks the innocent passenger “a 20 minute walk” from the railway station, as kindly posted deep on some local government webpages for the city of Leicester. The time of the connecting train would require friend-in-question to get there in 10. That basically means that he’ll have to wait for an hour for the next one. From there, one or two changes later, he will arrive in Norwich no earlier than sometime after 6pm.

A bigger problem though, is how you go about getting tickets for such a journey. Not having an integrated transport system, means that I had to search for each part of the journey seperately. A seperate ticket for the bus from the airport to Leicester, and the subsequent trains thereafter, etc. By searching, I mean online, of course. 21 Century and all that. Can I buy the tickets online? Technically yes, from thetrainline.com, a private company given an allocation of tickets by the multitude of different train operators who service their respective lines. After selecting all the journey details and times, you’re then presented with a page offering you various different prices and times, also telling you that it might be cheaper to buy single tickets, directing you to click elsewhere. After selecting the cheapest ticket (why would you select a more expensive ticket for exactly the same journey?), they want the dosh. E-ticket? Nope. They post it to you. Ok… a bit behind-the-times, but i’m prone to a whiff of nostalgia every once in a while. Click. What the??!! The postage costs extra? £6 extra that is! Out of principle, I wouldn’t pay to have my train tickets posted to me, which is an inconvenience in the first place. It was then that I noticed there is another option…

It’s called Fast Ticket, and allows you to pick up the ticket from automated machines at the station, at no extra charge. That’s more like it. Click. Scroll and select station, hmm, ok, this list isn’t very long… Lancaster, Liverpool, London,.. Typical! Of course they don’t have these machines at every station, that would be ridiculous! But surely in many of the larger cities? My home city of Southampton, for example? Nope. My University City, Norwich? No, don’t be stupid! After recovering from the near nervous breakdown which ensued, I pulled myself together and went over to the travel shop on campus. It was surprisingly empty, the queue often starts some way outside the shop itself, and something looked different. It was then that I noticed A4 print-outs taped around the counter explaining that no tickets could be issued today as the booking system was down. Nonplused, I held out and went back early next morning. Booking system back up and running. We were close. 15 mintues later, after causing the assistant necessary headaches trying to work out the journey, a wad of tickets, fresh from the printer were finally in my hands. Open-return, £32.70. Now I just need to post the tickets off. Godspeed, undiscerning travellers. Good luck Mandus!