Greater Anglia stopped a train for me

Last Friday my wife & I were just a few minutes late for the last Greater Anglia service out of London Liverpool Street to our home.

Our destination was a rural station which is served by the 23:28 train, but not the 23:58 one (it's the truly last fast train to Cambridge, but it skips about half of the stations, including ours).

We did get onto the 23:58 one, because what other choice did we have, but this meant that we would have to leave the train on the nearest station to our home and try to call an expensive taxi, which we weren't even sure would arrive.

I wrote a desperate tweet, tagging Greater Anglia and explaining our situation. I didn't think anything would come of it of course, seeing how it was past midnight and we were obviously in the wrong, having missed the last train.

But they did reply quickly, initially saying that they weren't sure anything could be done, but that they passed it to the train dispatcher for our area.

Then, when we were at a stop about 15 minutes after that and still about 15 minutes to our destination, the train displays went blank for a few seconds and then the announcement came. "This is a Greater Anglia service to Cambridge". (Very long pause and displays blinked again) "We will be calling at..." and they listed all of the usual stations for the train, but this time including our rural station which the train was never supposed to stop at!

So long story short, Greater Anglia did change their schedule on an extremely short notice, the train did stop at our station and we were home shortly after that.

I don't know why, but I was really touched by this and I even teared up a bit (very unusual, as I'm very reserved normally). Several complete strangers—the GA social media manager, the train dispatcher, and the train driver—cared about me when they absolutely didn't have to.

It's a minor event in the grand scale of things, but this small episode somehow changed how I view people, society and all of this stuff in general. Many might call it stupid to be moved by something like that. But I was moved. And I just wanted to share this story with you.