Credit:PA
A rail passenger has described his “insane” 11-hour journey to Edinburgh which ended at 3.30am after a “ridiculous” taxi ride.
Stand-up comedian James Nokise said he was among “hundreds” of passengers ordered off an Avanti West Coast train at Preston station in Lancashire on Monday night.
The train company arranged for taxis to take the travellers to their destinations.
Staff from Greenfaulds High School, Glasgow, were forced to order their own coach to take 50 pupils home after a trip to London as they were too young to travel in taxis without an adult.
Nokise was driven to the Scottish capital with three other people in a black cab.
In a series of posts viewed more than 2.6 million times on social media platform X – formerly known as Twitter – he wrote: “At 4.40pm I jumped on a train from London to Edinburgh.
“It was comfy, it was quiet. In hindsight, too good to last.”
At 10.30pm he was in the final group of travellers to get in a cab, describing the situation as “ridiculous”.
The comic wrote that shortly after midnight “our cabbie decided to change lanes without indicating and almost crashed into a mini-van overtaking him”.
Nokise expressed sympathy with the cabbie – who stopped to buy two cans of energy drink – as “it is late, it’s a dark highway and he’s driving a city black cab not meant for this road”.
He added: “Perhaps, just possibly, throwing money at cab drivers and getting them to drive several hours in the middle of the night might not be the best contingency plan for train companies to have.”
The A72 is “a real motion-sickness nightmare of a road” which is “narrow, dark, full of turns and occasionally just dips,” he wrote.
During the taxi journey, Nokise received an email from Avanti West Coast informing him he would receive £70 compensation, which was how much his ticket cost.
After being dropped off at Edinburgh Waverley station at around 3am, he had to take another taxi to his accommodation.
In his final post on the trip, he wrote at 3.30am: “Thanks for being on this journey with me Twitter.
“A truly insane odyssey. Five hours late, 11 hours after I jumped on the train.
“I’m going to have a shower and eat something.
“Let’s never do this again.”
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