Snow joke to be cut adrift!

It's cooking up a snowy storm still in Olde Londone Towne, and our beloved public transport system is coping about as well as you'd expect. But tales of hour-long delays on the way in to Liverpool Street don't come close to matching this story from the Times Archive, about a train which got completely buried in snow in 1891 - and wasn't found for two days.

It was March, and a blizzard covered most of the West Country. The Times reported that it was the heaviest fall of snow for 50 years, "and the gale that accompanied it rose at times to a hurricane". Ships were wrecked, sailors swept into the seas and houses marooned by collossal snowdrifts.

And on Monday evening, perhaps a little unwisely, the 6.35 p.m. from Princetown toddled off towards Yelverton.

The passengers were dug out on Wednesday. It had been snowing so heavily that a farmer living just 200 yards from the train hadn't even noticed it. The report notes that "All the compartments of the carriages, although the doors and windows were closed, were filled with snow up to the hat racks."


But at least they got cake. Which is more than can be said for the East Coast Main Line.