The One Story About Didcot

The virgin train, en route from Portsmouth to Glasgow, stops, abruptly, inbetween Didcot Parkway and Appleford stations. We look around, in our carriage, and murmur and grumble as we sit inert.

Word makes it’s way down the train, inevitable and insidious in it’s growth like rising floodwater,that there’s been an accident on the line ahead. After twenty minutes we are shunted into Didcot parkway train station and told that a man has jumped in front of a train in Appleford, and the line ahead is closed.

I make my way outside, blinking and with sore arms and shoulders from carrying bags. We are informed, by a surrounded guard, that buses will be sent to pick us up. People are on phones, already rearranging meetings or pick ups from relatives and friends. I wonder if it’s rude to feel inconvenienced by a stranger’s suicide.

Going back into the station in search of coffee, still clutching my ticket in my hand, I see the station staff is engaged with enquiries from angry passengers. They are all hand gestures and no answers, and quickly retreat back into the ticket office, pulling down blinds and shutting themselves away to regroup. Nobody knows anything. People are calling others further down the line trying to find information. The guard says the line is closed for the evening and that the buses are on their way. One man phones his girlfriend who is waiting at Oxford, she says the line will be reopened in half an hour.

I find nothing but a cherry coke and a Mars Bar to keep me going, and go back outside. The stranded passengers have arranged themselves on the grassy verge next to the dual carriageway outside the station. People hand out bottles of water and drinks from the station shop that’s having a bumper sales day. One man claims he knows where the nearest pub is, and takes two dozen people with him to find it.

A bus arrives later, and swamped, struggles to escape the carpark, having been filled with barely a quarter of the waiting passengers. We are promised more transport is on it’s way.

Far off, the three great thick powerstation chimneys sit, squat and all knowing. Making great clouds of smoke either side of the motorway. I remember a friend from university who used to live in didcot, and the only other thing I can remember out the town is that there’s a rail museum.

I remember an article I read about rail suicides, and the alarming proportion who are found with return tickets on their person. I wonder if the man, (for some reason I imagine a man) in appleford has one. Whether he’s planned this day for months, whether it was inexorable, or whether it was unexplained; a final brutal example of free will and human spontaneity.

I look at the passengers on the grass. Drinking bottles of volvic and eating crisps, hemmed in by a fence of traffic. Mothers and Fathers and their children. Couples. Husbands and Wives. Sitting as if having one of the picnics they remember from their childhoods.