Apparently this is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me
It was August 2019. Friday. I’d just had a holiday a week beforehand, so I was in a good mood. I rarely have holidays. I don’t let myself have a break. Whenever I’m not at work, I’m sinking hours and hours into making my online content.
My commute goes from Kentish Town station to either Kings Cross or St Pancras. There’s two lines at Kentish Town. Sometimes I get the underground to Kings Cross, or when it looks like it’ll get me there quicker I get the over ground line to St Pancras and then walk across to Kings Cross and a get a train home from there. That day I got out of work slightly early, so the quickest train would be an over ground train to St Pancras.
Usually this line isn’t that reliable. The only time I’ve ever known the trains on this line to be running on time was during the pandemic. That was actually my early warning sign that things were about to get real: 16th March 2020: my train was actually on time today.
Anyway, so I got on a mostly empty train and sat down. The train got into the tunnel approaching St Pancras and stopped. I expected this and just continued listening to music on my phone for a few minutes. I didn’t hear the first announcement from the driver, but it probably went something along the lines of “we apologise, we’re stuck at a red signal, we’ll be on the move shortly.”
Five minutes slowly became ten minutes. I breathed deeply. I was still in a good mood, so I wasn’t going to let this get to me. I looked at the time on my phone and was trying to calculate whether I’d be able to make the connection at Kings Cross.
The driver apologised again. He sounded a bit upset.
Suddenly it was twenty minutes.
That was when the lights went out.
Its really strange seeing the inside of a train carriage lit by nothing but your phone screen and the tunnel lights outside the carriage. There’s something unnatural about it.
The driver then made another announcement apologising for the lack of lights. He said there was a power outage and he was trying to get through to the control centre but no one was answering. It was like being in a quirky British horror film. My usual crowd of internet followers will obviously reference the classic Doctor Who episode about yetis in the London Underground tunnels. I shut my eyes and imagined hearing the sound of a monster outside the carriage in the tunnel.
Anyway, then one of my fellow passengers, who’d been walking down carriages stopped when he found me and talked to me. He said he’d met a woman who was probably about to miss a flight at Gatwick because of this. Other passengers had it much worse than me. All I had to do that evening was go home, make dinner and return to work on a YouTube video so it didn’t matter if I was twenty minutes late.
The man sat down, obviously infuriated, and crossed his arms.
We both sat in the dark in silence for a moment.
“So…how’s your day been?” I asked, almost like I was in a sitcom.
“Let’s not do that,” he said irritably.
I don’t blame him for not wanting to start a conversation. That would be him accepting that this was the current state of affairs for the foreseeable future. If you get to know a stranger under these circumstances it would almost be like saying “so I suppose this is my life now. Stuck on a dark train in a tunnel”.
We sat in silence for a while, but then he gave in and we started talking. Mostly about London. Trains. Politics. This was just after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. I told him I wasn’t convinced by those little videos he kept putting out.
“He thinks he’s Churchill, doesn’t he?”
The guy nodded laughing “yeah, that’s exactly right.”
I’m under no impression this is the most original observation ever, but it got us talking, and that’s something. We’d broken the city stereotype. You know what the stereotypes are. New Yorkers are angry, Parisians are snobs, Londoners are cold and distant and never talk to anyone.
At one point the driver said over the tannoy that he’d been told there was another train stuck right behind us with hundreds of people trapped inside it. That made me and my fellow passenger count our blessings that we had mostly empty carriages. Imagine being trapped like sardines stood squeezed together at rush hour for such a long time underground with the lights out. I would have been on that train if I’d got out of work a few minutes later.
About two hours in and we both agreed that it would actually be incredibly disappointing if this didn’t end with us being made to get out and walk down the tracks. A ten minute delay is annoying. A twenty minute delay is angering. A half hour delay is a tragedy, but there comes a point where a delay stops being annoying and becomes genuinely exciting. Its a story. Its an experience.
About three hours in, and the driver announced on the tannoy that he had contacted the control centre.
“Come on…come on…” me and my fellow passenger whispered together.
The driver then confirmed that he was waiting for approval to let us get out and walk down the tracks.
We both looked at each other and went “YES!”
The driver said that all passengers should come up to the front carriage. I obviously got out my phone at that point and recorded everything that happened, which you can go watch on my alt YouTube channel here. The video isn’t that stable because the camera on the back of my phone was broken so I was using my front camera so I couldn’t actually see what I was doing.
As you can see, our train had been sitting a few hundred metres from the platform for hours.
The driver was told they’d shut off the breakers so the power would stay out even if the grid came back online, so we could get out and walk down the tracks safely. It was funny to think I’d been through that tunnel thousands of times but the only difference was I wasn’t in a carriage.
We got back up onto the platform, having to step over the rails. It was still nerve-wracking even though the power was off.
The announcement boards on the platform were still on and they showed no times next to the trains.
Back up at the ticket barriers, the attendants had shut them and hundreds and hundreds of people were waiting at the gates and watched a small dribble of the thirty of us who’d walked up the tracks come out the escalators that were just out of their reach. I can’t imagine what they must have been thinking. “Huh, so are the trains actually going again?”
I don’t know what happened to the hundreds of people on the train behind ours. Maybe they had to get out and go in the other direction.
In the outside world at last, I went over to Kings Cross and saw there was no sign of any trains going anytime soon. Passengers everywhere, everyone . I walked past several news crews. It was surreal seeing reporters on the scene in real life, talking about something that had actually happened to me.
The power was still out. The automatic doors weren’t working and had been opened manually.
I didn’t even have a signal on my phone. I tried connecting to the station Wi-Fi: no signal. Probably the result of several thousand people trying to see what the internet was saying about whatever had just happened all at once. I had to walk down the street to get my signal back again, at which point I received several concerned text messages from my partner that had been sent over the last few hours while I’d been unable to receive them. I called her and told her what happened. We’d been stuck in a tunnel for about three hours. I didn’t know when I’d be back because the power still wasn’t back on and I had no other way of getting home.
I went to a pub nearby, bought a drink, connected to the Wi-Fi and started posting about it on Twitter. I kept being contacted by journalists asking if they could use the videos I posted. I was so giddy from all the attention that I just said yes to everyone. If I’d had that amount of attention for something I’d written or a YouTube video I’d posted I would have been over the moon, but instead it was just me being a bystander. That was enough.
The pub got busy. I was enjoying myself. Suddenly it was hours after I should have been home from work. I wasn’t even following the updates on the delays anymore. I didn’t even care what time I got home anymore. It was as if London itself had said to me “Y’know what? you deserve a night out Stuart, and I’m going to give you a reason to have one.”
I had a few drinks and ended up getting an Uber to Finsbury Park where I got a train home. I had a very enthusiastic chat with my Uber driver because now I had a story to tell. It made me interesting.
I found one of my Tweets had been used on the BBC live news coverage.
What I love about this report is that obviously they reported it with a grave tone about a ‘total catastrophe’ right above a tweet in which I sound quite upbeat about the whole thing.
I kept being contacted by journalists about it for months afterwards. In January 2020, a whole six months later, I was contacted by a journalist at ITV evening news who was putting together a report on the aftermath of the incident. We arranged to meet and record an interview just outside Kentish Town Station. I’ve never had much contact with a news media production before and didn’t realise their crews are much smaller than narrative pieces. It was literally just the journalist with a microphone and a guy with a camera. I stood and answered her questions, still quite upbeat about it. It actually was a positive memory to me because it was so unlike any other commute I’d been on. I think a part of that got lost in the coverage. Journalists kept expecting to hear from ‘DISGRUNTLED COMMUTER WAS STUCK ON A TRAIN FOR HOURS’ and my positive take on the whole thing didn’t make sense to them. I took a selfie. It was fun.
The ITV report was supposed to air the following night. Then a few hours after we recorded it, Donald Trump tweeted something stupid about Kim Jong-Un and everyone was panicked that world war three was about to start. I got a call from the journalist the next day. This is what she said when I picked up the phone:
“Hi, is that Professor Green?”
“…um, n-no, its Stuart Hardy.”
I’m not sure if she’d been meaning to speak to Professor Green, the English rapper, or a different Professor Green from some university talking about nuclear war or something.
Anyway, she said we’d been bumped to ITV local because, y’know. World war three.
Another year and a half later, I was contacted by a producer working on a documentary for channel 5 called ‘When Train Journeys go Horribly Wrong’. They’d found my tweets and videos and wanted to have me as a contributer. I agreed because I still found it funny that this had somehow morphed into the entire reason TV industry people found me interesting.
We recorded the interview at my office in Kentish town after work one night. Again, it was just a one man crew. He set up a green screen by my boss’s desk, ran the camera, radio mic, and sat and just prodded me to talk about it. He tried to get me to include the ‘train journey went horribly wrong’ into what I said somewhere and I was reminded of that bit from the Simpsons where the reporters want a soundbite. I still insisted on giving a positive take on the story because I still felt warm about it.
I wasn’t sure if it was ever gonna air because I heard basically nothing for a long time afterwards, but it was a fun experience for me. The guy said he’d watched my YouTube channel before coming to meet me and said he thought it was cool. I’ve never gotten used to the fact my online presence is actually something people in the real world can see. I always just see the internet and real life as two separate things for some reason.
He made me do a ‘hero shot’ in the car park where he recorded me folding my arms in slow-motion. It was really cheesy and I almost pissed myself laughing halfway through. What I’m supposed to be a ‘hero’ for I’ve no idea.
Anyway I got called a week ago and apparently ‘When Train Journeys go Horribly Wrong’ is on Channel 5 this Saturday. October 14th. 8pm. So if anyone wants to watch a 90 minute documentary about train journeys that went wrong, I’m in it at some point talking about how this one incident made me happy because it made me interesting for a bit.
