A Major Disruption…

*Warning – discussion of suicide*

Last night I got home at 12:05am I should have been home by 5:30pm. At around 4:45 my train hit something on the tracks, the impact against high speeds was significant, we felt something thud and ripple across the carriage. We then heard a metal crunching sound and the smell of burning metal as we slowed to a stop. The lights went off and people began to panic, had we come off the rails, had we gone over debris on the track? For almost 45 minutes we heard nothing from anybody, no announcement. Out of nowhere police began filing through the carriage letting us know we had not run over debris, but we had hit someone who had jumped from the station, we would be there for a while as they cleared the scene, took evidence and relieved the Driver of his duties.

In front of me the woman was effing and blinding, she had a hotel booked to see her boyfriend, this was inconvenient. I sat as around me people continued talking, exclaiming they’d be home late, huffing and puffing. I felt shell shocked, someone would be late to a hotel to meet their partner, someone else tonight would have the Police arrive at their door to share that someone they loved had died. We sat on the train for around 4 hours with little communication, Police handed out waters and tried to update us when they could, the electrics had been blown and all trains along this busy route had been stopped. They might evacuate us onto the tracks to walk back to the station, they might try to get this train back to the station, they might evacuate us onto another train…

As time went on people became more aggressive to staff, demanding why there wasn’t more communication, why wasn’t the replacement driver being quicker? Why hadn’t they brought food for us? I couldn’t believe the audacity, a few carriages ahead of us someone had died, a Driver had witnessed something awful. We could wait. As we waited, I googled what could we expect to happen for the remainder of the journey. The National Rail website told me that in 2019/2020 283 suicides or suspected suicides occurred. What an absurdly huge number. 283 loved ones. I fought back tears, just a year and a half ago that person could have been me. In the depths of my postnatal depression, I didn’t want to live. This felt so close to home.

At around 9pm a train from Kings Cross arrived, rammed because trains had not been operating for several hours. I just about squeezed on when a woman peered at the doors with her child sobbing, tired and overwhelmed, I stepped off to let them on. At around 11pm taxis were called to take us back to Cambridge, there were no more trains. Small children had exhausted themselves to sleep in buggies. An 80-year-old man named Stuart with severe Parkinsons was left behind in his chair as people clambered to get seats on taxis.

Amongst this, a man with his 2 young children and dog were joined by a couple who walked the dog up and down the carriages, read to the children and chatted with them, for hours. They hauled buggies up the stairs of the station and counted steps with the little ones as they walked. I chatted with Stuart in the cold about his plans for the weekend until his wheelchair taxi arrived. I shared a taxi with another mum, we exchanged numbers and texted each other to make sure we got home safe. There were moments of shared humanity and genuine compassion. I share this probably as some sort of therapeutic exercise but also to encourage everyone to consider their shared humanity and at a time where globally leaders are fostering division.

(Please contact the Samaritans if you feel affected by this post: https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/)