Wedding Belle & Alarm Bells

Sunday was the busiest day that I’ve ever worked at the Nene Valley, which in one sense was unfortunate as I wasn’t in my usual peak physical condition to appreciate everything that was going on.  I wasn’t rostered in to begin with as I was attending a wedding on Saturday and expected to get a bit – ah, tired – during proceedings.  But the railway was desperate for staff with the extra activities, so I agreed to pop down and help out.

The wedding itself was excellent and celebrations continued long into the night, assisted by a glass or two as might be expected.  I was staying overnight at the hotel to avoid driving and eventually retired to my room for a good night’s sleep so that I’d be fighting fit and ready for duty.

Naturally, things didn’t go quite to plan.  The hotel was, like all British hotels, ridiculously over heated with radiators on even in the middle of our Lincolnshire heatwave.  I opened the only window to the regulation 6 inches before it jammed but that didn’t help.  Teams of navvies were practising riveting in my head – possibly related to all the free alcohol, but there’s no absolute proof of that.  Consequently sleep was impossible until I finally drifted off in the wee small hours.  And promptly awoke again, because I’m at that awkward age where waking up in the night is a daily occurrence.  Off to the bathroom where I made the catastrophic error of turning the light on.  This was connected to an extractor fan, which in turn was connected to a jet turbine in the car park and made enough noise to wake up everybody in the hotel plus several surrounding streets.

Return to bed, where I managed to get to sleep for a good five minutes before the alarm woke me up ready for the new day.  Oh goody.  Back into the bathroom, but this time sans illumination so that at least the jet turbine didn’t kick in.  The shower had two temperature settings, flay the skin or frostbite, so I was in and out as quickly as possible and wishing that I hadn’t left my burns kit bag at home.

Down to breakfast at the appointed hour of 08:00, only to discover that the appointed hour applies to guests, but not the staff who were having a lie in.  At 08:15 a waiter turned up and offered coffee and toast, but anything else was out of the question because the chef wasn’t in, and even when she did turn up she’d need to ‘turn everything on’.  I was too under the weather to argue, so accepted lukewarm coffee to go with toast that I consumed with those horrible packs of butter that had been left out in the restaurant all night with the radiators turned on during a heatwave, plus those plastic packs of marmalade that can only be opened by an arc welding kit.

I had to leave by 08:30 to get to the railway on time, so that ended my experience at this establishment – I won’t embarrass the Kings Hotel of Grantham by naming and shaming them – oops.  Sorry.

At Wansford I was able to get breakfast from Jayne’s ever reliable café and remedy that particular problem, but I still generally felt shattered from the previous day’s events.  And the NVR was in for a busy time as it was a major family fun day, with two mainline trains running as well as Thomas on the Yarwell shuttles, a Routemaster bus service, a kids play park had been set up in the fields and it was the peak holiday season.  I was working as TTI on the DSB rake of open coaches, and were we busy or what?!  All trains loaded very well and the atmosphere was great.  I also worked a couple of Thomas shuttles during the layovers at Wansford, as it was helpful to have extra bodies available to load and unload bikes, buggies, prams and toddlers.  The day passed very quickly and only on the last train of the day did I have the chance to sit down as the service returned to Wansford.

Unusually I was too busy / knackered to take photos, so those on this page are representative of the services we ran.  For the record, Thomas top n’ tailed with the Polish Tank (Piotr?) on two coaches up and down to Yarwell, whilst the Mk1 rake and DSB stock were hauled by our class 14 diesels due to continued ban on using steam locos on the eastern end of the line.

By the time I got home I was ready only for bed – or scrap heap depending on your point of view.  However, my initial task was to get the wedding photos uploaded and onto Facebook; such are the rituals of life in the 21st Century!