Aberystwyth; Friday, 21 June, 2019

I’d been at a conference in Birmingham, where work had been an exhibitor, for the whole day, having come up the night before, so was already carrying around a lot of luggage with me, alongside a roller-banner and the rest of the contents of the display stand. I’d been wondering about how I was going to cope with transporting the roller banner all the way to West Wales and back when I’d had a sudden brainwave mid-afternoon and checked on the website of the left luggage company that operates the service at New Street. At £21 it was expensive, but worth it for the lack of hassle, so once the conference ended I grabbed an Uber, loaded up the boot and headed to New Street.

The conference had finished at 16:00 and I was booked on the 18:25 train, which I was a bit worried about being quite full. After I’d checked the roller banner in for its long weekend in Birmingham I checked the times of the trains, and more importantly the inbound progress of the train that would form mine and decided to pay the £4 for a day return ticket to Birmingham International and head out there.

The train to Aberystwyth starts at Birmingham International and my reckoning was that I would be pretty much guaranteed a seat there, but by New Street the crowds at just after 6 on a Friday night would be quite large and I could end up having to stand with luggage for a long while, so I caught the slow train out to International and crossed over to the platform where the Aber train was due to come in on.

Bang on time, a very small two coach train pulled into platform 1, emptied it’s passengers out and people started boarding for the journey to Aberystwyth. I was one of the first to board so I was able to grab a decent window seat and stow my luggage in the big luggage rack at the end of the train. The train sat in International for about 15 minutes before it was due to depart and quite quickly started to fill up with people.

By the time we left International there were only about half the seats left on the train, and as we pulled into New Street there were clearly far more people on the platform than there were seats for them and even possibly standing room.

Boarding at New Street took quite a bit longer than originally timetabled, and by the time we set off the train was properly packed, with people crammed in the aisle and nobody able to move. Due to the time we’d take at New Street we ended up stuck behind a slow train and crawled most of the way to Wolverhampton, arriving about 15 minutes late, and at least here a few people got off, only for even more people to pour on.

For the people standing it must have been a pretty unpleasant journey all the way to Telford, nearly an hour after we left New Street, where the train finally emptied enough for everyone to be able to sit down. The train then continued to empty at Wellington and at Shrewsbury where it was empty enough for me to be able to swap seats so that I was still facing forwards as the train changed direction there.

The journey from Shrewsbury across the middle of Wales is a pretty spectacular one, with views of the hills and mountains always part of the scenery. It’s pretty, but it isn’t fast, taking well over 90 minutes to do the 75 miles, but despite all the delays on route we finally pulled into Aber on time. I quickly made it off the train and into a taxi for the short ride round to the Premier Inn where I could check-in and finally get changed out of my suit that I’d been sat in all day.

I’d managed to time everything just right and I was able to be back out on the seafront to see sunset on the longest day of the year – which from the calm waters of the North Beach at Aberystwyth was impressive. With the sun below the horizon I went for a bit of a wander around town before heading back to the hotel for a well-deserved sleep.