h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello Jane,

I saw your message on Azahar’s photo gallery thread. It’s funny that you used to work at Ipswich Railway Station. My boyfriend is a train driver. He drives for Freightliner (Ipswich) now, but previously drove passenger trains for GER (based at Colchester). He started work on the railway as a junior rail man (at Ipswich) in 1980 and has been a guard and a 2nd man before graduating to driver about 12 years ago.

I don’t know Stanton, although I may have seen signposts for it. I’ve been to Bury St Edmunds a couple of times and I really like it. I love Aldeburgh and Thorpeness too; in fact I love anywhere coastal. I still harbour the faint hope that I might be able to live in a coastal town or village one day. Still, it’s only about 12 miles to Felixstowe from my house, so some seaside is not far away.

I’ve never been to Tenerife (I’ve only been abroad three times ever, unfortunately). Is it sunny all year round?

Liz
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Hi Liz

It,s a small world isn,t it!! I worked at Ipswich Travel centre in 1986, then I was an area relief clerk for Norwich area so I worked at Thetford, Diss, Norwich, Ipswich and Bury, parcels, passenger, wages, basically wherever I was sent!! I loved the job, and I had great work colleagues, I recently made contact again after several years with one of my Ipswich colleagues, she married a guard from Ipswich, but they later split up.

No doubt your boyfriend remembers Brenda, she was the chief clerk in the travel centre, and I lived in total fear of her, I used to tremble when I heard her footsteps in the corridor!! when I started work there, she had been working there for ever!!! I would love to know what happened to Brenda.

When I was back to visit my family a couple of months ago, I took my mum to Felixstowe for the day, by train, naturally, how it,s changed, I can remember going to "Cordy,s" for fish and chips years ago, now it,s a very nice and trendy restaurant called "The Alex" we had a nice lunch there, I do like Felixstowe very much, years ago my friend and I used to go to THorpness boating lake and spend several hours just going round and round in the water, neither of us really knowing how to row the boat!!!

I live in Puerto De La Cruz, in the north of Tenerife, we have a very nice climate, nice winters, temperatures rarely get below about 15c, and in summer it,s rare that we have more than 30c, I have been here 15 years and I love it, my children were born here, and my cat Fifi.

We do not have any trains here on Tenerife.

Last week I had to do a quick trip to Germany, so I had the great pleasure of experiencing the Deutsche Bahn!!! I was so pleased to see that they too have late running trains nowadays, something unheard of 10 years ago!!! I had to travel from Hamburg to Karlsruhe on the ICE, beautiful trains which look to me a bit like concord, I also did a trip to Fredrickshaven, and then finally Baden Baden to Frankfurt to get my flight back, (husband is German, so I stayed with his family) I spent hours on trains in the 6 days I was there, and for me it was sheer, pleasure!!!

Love

Jane

I like the sound of your climate. We had a glorious summer last year, but this year it's been a lot wetter so far. The weather men say it's something to do with the jetstream being on the wrong side of us. This was scant consolation to me when I got wet walking to work this morning.

Felixstowe's a nice little place. I've got an aunt that lives there, so I was vaguely familiar with it before I moved to Suffolk. There were delays on the Felixstowe line last Saturday due to a broken down frieght train - I know this because my boyfriend was the driver of the failed unit. It was there all day!

I'll ask Chris if he remembers Brenda and let you know.

I like trains too. My Dad is a rail enthusiast and some people find it amusing that the daughter of a train spotter has a train driver for a boyfriend! I spent a lot of time looking at steam engines when I was a child and I still rather like them.

I'm fascinated by the London Underground too and I think half the fun of going to London is riding on the tube. I went to the official h2g2 meet in Hyde Park last week and someone very kindly gave me the number of the bus that I should catch from Liverpool Street to Hyde Park. I ignored that information and went by tube! Buses? Pah! Where's the fun in that?

I haven't travelled by train abroad. People say that trains in europe run more efficiently than ours, but I've not had much trouble with UK trains myself. I think I only ever had one significant delay. I quite fancy going on the eurostar and I hope to get the chance to do that one day. There will be a rail link from Stratford eventually, so that will be really easy to get to from Ipswich.

Liz
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Hello again Liz,

So you are not a Suffolk girl then, but Ipswich is a great place to live, especially as it is so easy to get to London from there, I was born and brought up in a farming community which is probably why I am a vegitarian!!! all my family think I am a bit odd coming from good old farming stock and not tucking into a nice chunk of steak and kidney pudding!!!

Oooops, I bet the passengers going to Felixstowe when the freight train failed, were not happy bunnies!!! I can remember when I worked at Ipswich station how normal, well balanced human beings suddenly turned into raging lunatics at the slightest sound of "delay" sometimes the reasons were horribly unpleasant like people deciding to end it all and jumping out in front of a train, causing the delay, but these nice, normal, steady people, mothers and fathers, grannies, priests and stockbrokers, people from all walks of life, would come to the counter and verbally assault us poor little innocent victims in the ticket office!!! I used to be terribly upset at first, until I heard some of the old hands with their witty one liners answer the customer, with irony, yet still with education and a smile!!! I soon learned how to handle the ranting and raging.

Yes, it seems to be a national pastime of the Brits to moan about the railway system, always saying how those abroad are soooooo much better, well, I haven,t travelled very much at all by train abroad, I would love to though, the German trains always used to be mega efficient and running to the second on time, but my recent travels proved this was no longer the case, I have no real cause for complaint at all, but I did encounter minor delays, and the trains, which I used, including the ICE, were not always as clean as I would have expected especially compared to when I travelled by train there 8 years ago, standards have definitely dropped, and there was a definite lack of information, they have cut their staff quite drastically.

Oh, yes running around London on the tube is really fun, I love it too, when I visited England in April I flew into Luton, and unfortunately I couldn,t pursuade anyone to come to Luton to pick me up, they would all come to Stansted but not to Luton!!!! I didn,t mind too much because it gave me the opportunity to go by train, now if I remember correctly I travelled to Farringdon by train, then caught the tube from there to Liverpool St. It,s massive nowadays, I feel like a real foreigner when I visit, everything has changed so much!! and I found I had totally forgotten how to find my way around on the tube, so I felt like a real pratt, because I had no option but to ask someone to confirm I was going in the right direction!!

At Ipswich I had a really great bunch of colleagues, we were all quite young, in our mid to late 20,s at that time and we were often to be found in the Station hotel opposite!!!! Off duty, naturally.

I think it,s very fitting that a train spotters daughter should find herself a nice train driver!!!! my railway connections are few, but my uncle Derick, actually a cousin of my dad who was more like a brother to him, is a retired train driver, and an uncle of my dad, who for some obscure reason was called niger, was the crossing keeper at Mellis in the 1950,s which I can imagine to be a scene right out of the film "oh Mr Porter" !!! When I worked at Diss station, Lenny and Charlie the platform "boys" who made the strongest tea in England ready for my 05,45 start, remembered him and had even been to his funeral!! when I worked at Diss, those two boys had been working there for about 30 or more years!!!

Sorry to hear about the great British summer, a canarian friend of mine,s daughter is over on a school trip at the moment and is finding the climate rather hard to cope with, especially as it was so nice when she visited for the first time last year!!!

Keep your umbrella close by!!!

I hope I haven,t bored you with my ramblings!!!

Jane

Hi Jane - It's so nice to find someone else who goes in for long rambling posts. I do a nice line in those myself.

Chris does remember Brenda and he can remember quite of few of the girls who worked in the travel office too, although he isn't very good with names. I read him your post and he can picture two women that might be you!

You have my admiration for having done a customer facing job - particularly for the railways! I briefly worked in an admin capacity for a company that made (unreliable) gas boilers. I just couldn't take the abuse and I resigned after only 8 months.

I know the Station Hotel myself - I worked at CompAir Reavell on Ranelagh Road for seven years and myself and some colleagues often used to go there for a drink on a Friday lunch time. I left Reavell's in 1996 and I don't think I have been to the Station Hotel since.

The weather has turned a bit more summer-like over the past few days. I am on annual leave since yesterday (23rd) through until 2 August. I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon in my back garden - I intend to make the most of any sunshine we get as the long range forecast is for the weather to continue to be unsettled. My fella and I are off to Bath on Tuesday for a short break. We generally travel by car on holiday as driving long distances on the road is something of a novelty for Chris. Unfortunately, there are a lot of trips that are easier by car than by rail. We tend to head west for our holidays (previous destinations have included the West Coast of Scotland, the Lake District and Cornwall) and east/west by train is something of a faff. I once went all the way from Ipswich to Aberdeen by train to visit a friend, but it was an awfully long haul (particularly as I was travelling alone) and it took all day to get there.

I have chosen Bath for our holiday, partly because (at four hours estimated driving time) it's not too, too far away and also because there is a lot to do in that area, both indoors and out. At the moment, it looks as though we might get lucky with the weather so I can see myself tramping up and down hills in the Cotswolds or the Mendips (Chris is something of an action man) rather than walking around museums. I definintely want to see the Roman Baths and the costume museum again (my last visit was on a Brownie outing about 30 years ago!) and if the weather is iffy, we may visit the Jane Austen Centre.

I hope to chat to you again when I get back from my hols.

Liz
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Hi Liz

Have a great holiday, and I shall be keeping my fingers crossed that the great British summer weather holds!!

Me and the kids spent the day in Los Cristianos again, but today was terribly hot, we have calima, that,s when we get the African heat, so it was actually a very unusual 38 degrees!! the only place to be was in the water, and that was pretty crowded today!!!

Well, tell Chris that my name is Helen, there were two of us Helen,s working in the travel centre at that time, I was the one who was always in trouble with the dreaded Brenda!!! but it,s probably hard to make a distinction between us girls in the travel centre at that time as we looked like clones with our cardboard polyester knee length navy blue skirts, the pleat in the middle used to cut your inner thigh, our white blouses, and very becoming acrylic navy blue jumpers that went bobbly upon the first wash!!! Ohhh, yes, I did have a bad hair day one day whilst working there, I went to the hairdressers for a colour (Brenda recommended them to me) and it went a very, bright and vibrant shade of PURPLE!!! I had to go to work one day with it like that, and everyone was laughing, I was crying of course!!!! (I think that really made Brenda,s YEAR).

Anyway, I am definitely not going to ramble tonight as I have to go to bed, once again have a lovely holiday.

JANE

Hi Jane, We had a lovely time in the West Country, visiting Avebury, Glastonbury and Cheddar as well as Bath. I returned to work yesterday and am struggling to catch up my workload as well as my h2g2 messages. I'm suffering from a touch of post-holiday come down and I really don't want to be in the office. It's cloudy and humid today and there are workmen making a racket all over the college. I want to go home! We had good weather while we were away, with Friday being particularly sunny. I've written a very long and rambling journal entry about my holiday http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F151314?thread=456091&latest=1, but it is VERY long so I quite understand if you don't fancy reading it. Purple hair - blimey! When I first told Chris about you, Helen was the name he came up with, so I shall tell him tonight that he was right. He is still on annual leave, the lucky swine, and I think he plans to spend the whole week on the golf course. Anyway, I must get on. Chat soon Liz ~