Didcot Cooling Towers
My ultimate destination was Chippenham. This required me to change trains at Didcot Parkway. The journey from Oxford to Didcot Parkway is about 15 minutes, so it went by fairly quickly. Didcot is sort of interesting. There’s a large power plant there with several very large cooling towers and smokestacks.
The layover at Didcot Parkway was supposed to be about 30 minutes, but there were some mechanical difficulties with the train from Paddington Station so we left about 6 minutes late. The railway people provided several announcements that the train would be running late and offered their humble apologies each time. I was amazed. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a train in the U.S. that came within 6 minutes of departing at the scheduled time and I don’t recall ever hearing an apology.
The trip to Chippenham was another half hour. I dozed for about 20 minutes to regain a little of my lost sleep.