Delhi delays
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2008
1
19
29
Trip End
Apr 01, 2009
Delhi,
India
Sunday, November 23, 2008
The thing about timetables is, you can work everything out from them, you know what time you're going to be somewhere so you can limit the time you waste waiting at stations and things. And all because some clever men sat down and worked how long a train took to make a particular journey, decided a time for it to leave and then wrote down what time it would arrive. And then he did that for lots of other trains and if it meant one got in the way of the other he adjusted the time of the first and so on and so forth.
When he was finished he gave a copy to the train drivers, and made a nice little book for the passengers. Only in India he forgot to give it to the train drivers, or they can't read or something, or it just takes much much longer to get from one place to another than it used to and they just haven't changed the timetables. The timetable really is a waste of time.
And the crazy thing is that the times are rounded to the nearest minute, they'd be better off rounding to the nearest day, then at least they might be correct once in a while. In our case, however, they'd have been incorrect by a total of '1'. Yes, our train was due to arrive at 1pm and didn't even arrive on the right day, we finally reached Delhi a few minutes after midnight!!!
The Indian railways have a great little website where you can find out just how late any particular train was on any of the last 7 days. The train we were originally booked onto arrived 13 hours late at 7am, which would have meant we would have missed our morning trip to Agra.
As it was, we managed about 5 hours sleep in a hotel near the station before getting a Rickshaw to another of Delhi's stations for the few hours trip down to Agra.
So a brief visit to Delhi, which we didn't even see in daylight, so I can't really give you my opinion of it, we had a nice toasted cheese sandwich for breakfast from the station though, so go there if that's your kind of thing!!!
