How we finally made it home thanks to bi-mode train traction - Susan Morrison

He and my husband exchanged Railway talk. My husband’s forehead wrinkled like a ‘before the Botox’ advert. There was, he explained, a problem. There was a ‘de-wirement’.

Now, I do ships. Trains I leave to him. Translation required. OK, he said, imagine we got in a lifeboat and discovered a slow leak. Ah, I said. But we are still afloat. Potentially, he said, but, he cautioned, it involves Northallerton. This, he intimated, was Not a Good Thing.

It certainly wasn’t. We got as far as Peterborough. Then we stopped. And there we stayed for hours. De-wiring, it turns out, is a Bad Thing. The electrical lines had come down at the legendary Northallerton and pulled the plug on the whole East Coast train set.

The staff did their utmost, but there wasn’t much ‘ut’ they could be ‘most’ about. This was a major fault. Kudos to the indefatigable Geordie train manager who regularly updated us to tell us that she had nothing to tell us.

At one point she said trains were struggling to get to York, which raised a fairly nightmarish image of Azumas rumbling above England's fields like giant caterpillars.

The dread phrase ‘replacement bus’ was used’. People around us started looking for hotels and hire cars. No, said my husband. We have comfy seats, books to read and enough water and crisps to see out the winter. We sit tight. Unusually for me, I agreed.

And then salvation arrived. The train to Aberdeen. Quick, said our train manager. Grab this train. But, said I, the doubting wife, we will only get to York and then it’s ‘replacement bus service’. Frankly, I’d rather have tea with Nigel Farrage.

My man knows Railway. This train goes North, he said. She has bi-mode traction. Diesel and electric. She will not dump us in York.

By jingo, he was right.

We were only four hours late home, a bonus these days. Still, it was a tale to tell.