That Time When… Our Train to Glasgow Didn’t Exist

In April 2019, I was poking around Google Flights’ Explore Tool just for fun – as one does – when I found cheap flights into London for the holidays. Before immediately booking them, we had to consider a few things:

1. We had not gone home for the holidays in 2018, instead opting to spend our time in Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris.
2. We were preparing to leave for our upcoming trip to Fortaleza, Brazil in May.
3. The tickets were less than $490 per person, roundtrip out of Tampa. We wouldn’t have to make the drive to Orlando to take advantage of the deal!

That last one was the clincher. We immediately started making plans to use London as our jumping off point for a visit to Scotland. Because we had missed out on Christmas at home the previous year, we reached out to my in-laws to see if they wanted to join us, and we began our plans for the four of us to visit both Edinburgh and Glasgow.

• 

• 

These plans included:

• Flying into London Gatwick, then taking the train from London to Edinburgh.
• Staying in an Old Town Airbnb in Edinburgh for four nights.
• Taking a one-day tour with The Hairy Coo to see Loch Ness, Glencoe and the Highlands.
• Taking the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow.
• Staying in a gorgeous Glasgow Airbnb for four nights.
• Riding the Caledonian Sleeper Train back to London.
• Ringing in the new year in London before flying back to Tampa on January 1.

We had all our tickets and reservations ready to go before we left Tampa, and we were confident in our itinerary. However, if we’ve learned anything about planning travel recently, it’s that the best laid plans… you know the rest.

So imagine us on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, arriving at Waverly train station in Edinburgh to find that the train station was actually closed. We had booked our train tickets to Glasgow via Rail Europe in September, and they had provided instructions to print our train tickets at the station, so we only had the confirmation email to go off of. Queue Tyler and I frantically trying to make calls and use the nearby mall’s WiFi to figure out what had happened.

Tyler’s mom ended up chatting with a mall employee to see if they had any additional information. Did they know why this station was closed? Could we have been at the wrong station? 

The employee informed us that, actually, there were no trains running from any train station in Edinburgh at all that day, and that we were not the first people to run into this issue. Their recommendation was to go to the nearby bus station and purchase a bus ticket to Glasgow. I quickly sent an email to Rail Europe that we would need to be refunded for our non-existent train, and we headed off to the bus station.

• 

• 

• 

Fortunately, we were able to quickly get a bus ticket to Glasgow, and the bus ride was fairly quick (and cheaper than the train). We ultimately didn’t lose too much time in our efforts to get there; however, it was a good reminder that you can make all the plans you want, but you need to be ready to adapt when things don’t go accordingly.