Why the trains are late, delayed or cancelled

London’s roads are congested. So if you want to drive into work you’d have to give yourself at least an extra hour to get there and an extra to get back home in the evenings. And this doesn’t even take into consideration the problems of parking. You basically won’t be able to find one. Yes people drive but most people use the local transport system such as buses, the underground and the rails. Those are often chockablock as well. The only real way to get about London, and often the quickest, is to use the underground. There is no traffic, although footfall can be astronomical, almost everyone uses it regardless of who they are or where they work; they could be CEOs or MDs. When I was at university I used the Westminster line to get to the House of Lords and there were so many MPs in the same carriage as me donning bowler hats, umbrellas and briefcases. So the underground is really everyone’s go-to when it comes to travelling through London. And if you need to get to Manchester or Birmingham or even Scotland from London, the overground British Rail is your best option. It’s comfortable and you don’t have to be driving for 2 to 6 hours to get there. Yes the trains can be late for a number of reasons. There could have been an accident or some sort of electrical failure or staff shortages due to strikes, of which there weren’t many when I lived there.

But more often than not, the main reason there are delays to trains is due to the poor weather conditions. In England when it rains, it pours. When the winds blow it’s often a hurricane and when it snows in the winter months, it blankets down. But there are subtle reasons too. For example, in the autumn when the leaves change colour and begin to fall, they blanket the train lines. Add rain to the mix and they turn to a kind of sludge and this can disrupt the electrics and the wheels of the train which can no longer go round and round, as the song goes. If there are strong winds a tree could have fallen on the tracks. Snowfall, if it’s especially heavy, can be a hindrance to the trains’ movement and particularly heavy rains can not only flood the lines but dramatically reduce visibility for the driver.

But now with the summer temperatures in the UK soaring, and some even saying that it could hit 40 degrees, there’s now another factor that causes train delays and even cancellations. The excessive heat ends up causing the rail tracks to expand and buckle (meaning they become wavy) which would obviously hinder the wheels’ movement. Apparently it’s the way the steel tracks are connected.

In the old days, the trains used to make those clackety clack sounds on the tracks. This was because smaller segments of tracks were joined together to leave small gaps in between so that if the tracks expanded due to the heat, they would not bend as the gap made allowances for the increase in the tracks length. Hence the clackety clack sound. Nowadays the track plates are much longer and that leaves very little room for any give so they end up expanding very significantly when the temperatures go up.

Of course, roads aren’t any better when it comes to extreme weather conditions.

Whilst heavy rains may not cause flooding, because the drainage system has been designed especially for such eventualities, but if you mix rain with fallen leaves in the autumn, you do end up with a sludge-like mixture that can be slippery. Moreover, ice is not your friend on the roads either due to the fact that it can cause tyres to skid. On the other hand the extreme heat may cause the asphalt on the roads to melt.

All this is probably because countries, like the UK that are used predominantly to the cold, wet weather, are not set up for extreme heat. Before the mid-90s the weather in the summer used to be hot but I don’t ever recall us getting into the 40s.