Travel back from the Netherlands

It would be the first time I would travel back on the direct train between Amsterdam and London. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about your connection in Brussels, but the bad news is you need to be in Amsterdam extra early, for security checks and passport control. If you change in Brussels you can just rock up at the platform in Amsterdam two minutes in advance. So I took the train from Amersfoort just before 7am, to get the 8:40 Eurostar. It was very quiet in the terminal when I got there. I had never been! But it’s just a terminal. Nothing special about it. 

Amersfoort station in the early morning 

The train left on time. But we hardly moved, or I received a text. We already had a delay; there was something wrong with the train, and it couldn’t ride at maximum speed. That would cost us some 20 minutes. That’s reasonable. 

The 20 minutes grew to 1.5 hours, for some reason. We stood still on Brussels for a long time. I was a bit fed up. My travel the other way was still fresh in my memory. But my trip had come with a generous period for changing trains in London. I managed to get the train I was booked on, even after having refilled my water bottle and buying a newspaper. The water was warm; there is a refill station at Euston, but it demanded all sorts of activities with phones and whatnot, and I couldn’t make it work. Why not just dispense water? And the toilets only yielded warm water. At least that cools down without any further input. 

Normally you can head straight for Crewe from there, but there was maintenance on the tracks, and from Euston, all trains went to Milton Keynes. From there, there were buses to Northampton. And only from there could one head for Crewe. It would be a long trip! At least I knew that in advance. 

Getting to Milton Keynes went smoothly, but there I ended up in a snaking queue for the replacement buses. That took a while. I did get a good seat, but I got to Northampton too late to get my connection. I had to take a later train. At least it was quiet in that train. And in Crewe and Chester all went fine. I was glad to finally get into a train that would actually get me to where I wanted to be! That was after 13 hours of train and bus travel. In total it was 14 hours. A lot! 

Three days later, chaos engulfed Eurostar travel. I was very glad I was back…

Big queue for the replacement buses