Complete...

Bloody meltdown again tonight.

F*cked up trains all over the place.

Sitting at Witham at the moment in the forlorn hope that the next Braintree train would be something like on time.

No bloody chance, it's currently somewhere the other side of Ingatestone waiting to get past the f*cked signals.

The latest guesstimate from the prick on the tannoy is 25 minutes late. Means I'm unlikely to get home this side of nine tonight.

I just f*cking despair.

According...

To the Network bloody Rail app, we're not due in to Witham till twenty past f*cking  seven.

We've just arrived at Chelmsford and the wanker on the tannoy was announcing then that there'll be no connection at Witham.

So we're going to be stuck in that shithole until the next train, or more likely the one after,  pitches up sometime towards eight or probably nine o'clock tonight, always assuming that one isn't f*cked up as well.

An ever present danger on this shambles of a railway.

All...

F*cked up tonight.

Presently we're just sitting at  Ingatestone because of f*cked up signals somewhere between here and bloody Chelmsford.

No clues when we're likely to start moving again, and we're now certain to miss the connection to the Braintree train at Witham.

Another triumph for the wankers running Network bloody Rail.

Arseholes.

There are...

Some staggeringly thin-skinned arseholes on the train tonight.

One in particular is really beginning to piss me off big time.

She's been sitting in a seat backing onto a group of teenagers. Every word from them was greeted with a theatrical sigh and a glare; as did a young kiddy sitting somewhere behind me.

She even took exception to some of the alerts I was getting on my mobile.

The miserable cow eventually pissed off into another part of the carriage. Good riddance.

Why get the train at this time of the evening if you want any peace and quiet?

Stupid bitch.

One of the few...

Joys of having to make this trek every day is just occasionally you get to see some - usually  foul-mouthed - little oik get caught traveling without a valid ticket and have their arse and a surprisingly large penalty fare/fine handed to them by a ticket inspector.

It just happened to one of the more deserving cases.

Happy days.

Another

Pisspoor evening traveling with no acceptable 3G signal.

Customers who subscribe to other networks have no difficulty obtaining a good signal. Orange? No f*cking chance.

Bastards.

Twice...

So far this morning I have attempted to get my season ticket for this week.

Once at the ticket office at Braintree where the clerk decided there wasn't enough time to issue me with a ticket before the train departed, (there was, it left 5 minutes late) and directed me to get my ticket from the conductor on the train instead.

The conductor was refusing to issue tickets because he was 'locking the doors out'.

Couple this with an automatic ticket machine being on the blink and we had yet another perfect storm of lazy incompetence typical of Greater Anglia lately.

Quite why the conductor considered it more important to lock the doors out is a mystery unlikely ever to be solved, given this is an 8 coach train and normally only the doors on parts of 12 coach trains are routinely locked out because some of the platforms between Braintree and Witham can't accommodate 12 coaches.

The last we saw of the conductor was as he disappeared into the drivers cab in the company of the driver.

So as it stands, 2 Greater Anglia employees have refused an offer to pay for my ticket.

It'll be interesting if any ticket inspector should decide I'm traveling without buying a ticket given the effort I've already gone to today.

UPDATE

I was finally  able to obtain my ticket at Stratford.

Thank you to the BTP constable manning the barrier for understanding my garbled account and for directing me to the right window.