I’m very confused..

[goddamnandblast]

I don’t want to be mean here but DP told me about an interaction a colleague of his had at work today:

A woman turned up at a station in Cornwall thinking she was on a train from London to France where she was due to catch a flight. Am I the only one who thinks this is insane?

1. Did she not wonder why the train didn’t go through the channel tunnel (or at the very least go over a very long bridge/ cross the sea in some way?)
2. Was she at all curious why all the signs were in English and not French?
3. Did she not listen to any of the station announcements on the entire 4hr journey from London to Cornwall?
4. Did she not think it weird that she didn’t have her passport checked or go through any kind of border when crossing into ‘France’?
5. She would have had to go to a completely different station in a different part of London to go to the West Country vs travelling internationally. Did she do no research at all?

I’m honestly a bit baffled and wondering if I’m missing something glaringly obvious here - in fairness the name of the station she ended up at and the Paris station started with the same 3 letters but….

Was she an English speaker? I don't speak French and managed to get 4 different, wrong trams in France the other day for what should have been a 15 minute trip. I have great empathy for anyone with my lack of sense of direction.

Are you saying she got off in Cornwall and thought she was in France?

@Crunchymum yes that’s it.

@HollywentLightly honestly I’m not sure but yes I think she was a native English speaker. Don’t get me wrong I’ve definitely gotten turned around many, many times and also have a terrible sense of direction but even I can’t imagine making a mistake of this magnitude!

Was her ticket not checked anywhere on the journey?!

She might have some degree of learning difficulties or a brain injury.

Or possibly is middle aged and in perimenopause and suffering terrible brain fog.

How bizarre.

So many questions.

Did she actually have a ticket to Paris? Is someone waiting for her / is there a swanky Parisian hotel missing an occupant? What happened when she realised? Did she have to turn around and go back to London to do the right journey? And most importantly, how did she get on the train to begin with? Most mainline London stations have barriers, you need a ticket to get through and a Eurostar ticket isn't going to work.

@Crunchymum that’s what I said when I heard this, it’s a bit of a mystery. From what I heard I think she was quite young (mum was helping her with the onward flight).

There’s only one London station where you can travel to the West Country and only one that you can travel to France (it even has international in the name). She would not have been able to get through the barrier if her ticket was actually for France so I can only guess that she turned up on the day and bought a ticket.

The staff had to send her back to London so yeah a very long wasted journey for her and she definitely would have missed the flight!

@GrannyAchingsShepherdsHutI suspect she bought a ticket for the Cornish station by mistake so the staff would have had no idea she was going to the wrong place when they checked it.

She may well have cognitive impairment, either developmental, acquired or progressive.

I can understand getting on the wrong train - if that train was going from the same station.
But Paddington (to Cornwall) and St Pancras (France) aren't even next door to each other !
How bizarre.
I would question how she got on the train but Paddington does have some platforms you don't need to go through a barrier.
Still utterly.....odd.

@Needmorelegoyes definitely quite easy to get on the wrong train from the same station, or one going the wrong way (I’ve done that one before!). I can understand maybe if you are in a rush and trying to get on the train you might be able to get on without going through a barrier and without checking the list of stations but there are multiple announcements during the journey which would have been at least 4hrs long (about twice the length of the journey from London-France) and there are rolling electronic lists on the trains plus maps of the route.

Train staff would definitely have alerted her if they saw she had a ticket to France that she was on the wrong train. Very odd how she got that far.

I wonder if she was trying to buy a ticket for Paris and bought a ticket to Par (near St Austell)

@goddamnandblast - a minor point of correction... there are actually TWO stations in London from which you can travel to the West Country, Paddington and Waterloo. However the Waterloo train does terminate at Exeter.

My DH regularly gets the train from our local station to the nearest town.
One day he got on the train and arrived in a another town in exactly the opposite direction. He'd been in a rush and the minute he got on the train had his head buried in a book. He didn't look up until he arrived in the wrong place and was astonished to find himself there.

Mistakes happen but admittedly he was only going one stop. I hope he'd have noticed if he started going through the Channel Tunnel or passed through a series of stations all with Cornish names.

This

Reminds me of the “To Nice” vs “Tunis” flight mishap going around social media a little while ago

Ah see that could make sense because Eurostar used to go from Waterloo.
But the trains from there to the West Country are those commuter style ones not inter-city so surely she'd not think one of those are for Paris 😂🤔