Man wakes up after night on sleeper train to find it never left Glasgow | Hacker News Reader

Man wakes up after night on sleeper train to find it never left Glasgow

theguardian.com

131 pointszeristor115 comments

There's a recent science fiction book I read where one of the premises is a generation starship designed to escape an apocalyptic Earth, but for reasons never manages to launch from its underground hangar. Yet its passenger population, locked inside its habitat module, live and die through multiple generations over hundreds of years thinking they are traveling through space.

Oooo I think I know that book. Really good book. I didn't see that twist coming.

What book is this?

Yes please share.

Not the commenter, this premise is a story line in Anthony Doerr's "Cloud Cuckoo Land" (2021). This knowledge is a bit of a spoiler, however.

wellwearewaiting.gif

There was also a TV series with that premise in 2014, as a late plot twist. I guess naming it would spoil it.

SPOILERS.

Similarly, there's the the TV series Noisnecsa (reverse the letters) where it starts out with the premise that they've going through space on such an inter-generational voyage, in a massive, self-sustaining ship. Then later there's a reveal that it's just experimental and stayed on the ground the whole time, with mission control monitoring them and periodically communicating.

(It was described as a hybrid of Mad Men and Battlestar Galactica.)

Warning: spoilers!

They also made the pretty good (and of course prematurely cancelled) 2014 mini series "Ascension" out of a very similar plot. Admittedly, although it stars absolutely top notch, it goes a bit downhill afterwards, but they could have saved it very easily instead of taking the easiest path. I wonder why aren't there incentives to prevent premature cancellations when the public likes the material? It seems they're eager to kill even profitable series if starting a new one from scratch brings more money, which seems logical, however, besides angering viewers, that way the cancelled series loses appeal and value also as a later DVD edition product.

At least in the case of Netflix, they are profitable because the actors contracts are heavily backloaded... and then surprised pikachu face the shows get canceled right before the escalator clauses kick in, typically after the 3rd season.

Topic drift, but remember that the business model for streaming series is different from traditional television. Netflix makes them to get you to buy a subscription. There's little new audience coming on board after two or three seasons of a show; the better proposition is to start up a new series instead. It's not like the traditional broadcast networks where every installment generates more advertising views as long as they can keep making it. This is also why streaming "seasons" are ten episodes or even less, compared to twenty-plus for traditional TV. Their motivation is minimum cost to get a subscription, not maximum supply to engage you.

That makes sense, thank you. On a second thought however, it could also work backwards: how can some people be motivated to subscribe for a new show knowing that the odds of it being cancelled are that high? Ideally, producers should ask by contract for a minimum number of episodes to give closure to stories. Of course I write this as an angered viewer.

(spoiler) i recently listened to a german audio drama "ki-mom" with a similar plot.

Thanks for the suggestion. I found it in the ARD-Mediathek. My vacation begins tomorrow and now I have something to listen to on my train ride to Vienna (which hopefully will leave the station).

if you enjoy german scifi audio drama, i found a few more:

2080: https://querschnitt.tumblr.com/

https://www.hoerspielprojekt.de/genre/science-fiction/

https://www.mindcrushers.de/

https://www.rick-future.de/

https://timeshift.blackdays.de/

https://www.serotonin-audio.de/

https://www.gratis-hoerspiele.de/alle-kostenlosen-science-fi...

there is also a 20GB torrent with lots of 1-hour german radio episodes. you can find it under the name: "german_audiobooks_radio-science-fiction". there are more of those on youtube.

and for star trek fans there is the german series eberswalde. http://www.raumschiff-eberswalde.com/

there is of course 10 times more in english...

The child comments seem to suggest that your comment was kind of a spoiler. Is it still worth reading despite this knowledge?

How cruel is it to post a summary like this without mentioning the name of the book???

Don't know that book, but do read Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. The Wikipedia article contains spoilers.

There’s a Dr Who episode about a civilization trapped in an underground highway with a similar outcome.

Update: found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(Doctor_Who)

P.A. VOICE: Trans-Stellar Space Lines would like to apologise to passengers for the continuing delay for the departure of this flight.

FORD: Hey, weird.

P.A. VOICE: We are currently awaiting the loading of our compliment of small, lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment, and hygiene during the flight, which will be of two hours duration. Meanwhile we thank you for your patience. The cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits… again.

FORD: Zaphod! How long has this ship been standing here?

ZAPHOD: Man, there’s a departure board right behind us and I’ve been looking at the flight schedules. Man this ship is late, man this ship is very, very late! Man this ship is over nine-hundred years late.

- Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Funny, I'm just reading the Guide and this scrne in my version Zaphood alone (no Ford around). However, the sentiment stays the same.

This is from the original radio play. The books were written later, and had quite a few details changed.

That's a quite frequent trope in Russian space fiction. I guess that's a reflection of how USSR expected to go in the future but went nowhere.

There is a classic SF short story to similar effect, "The Wind Blows Free" by Chad Oliver. (Unfortunately, a quick google search didn't turn up the text, though it exists in a number of printed compilations.)

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v013n01_...

Strange. That sounds almost exactly like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)

I actually enjoyed that.

Reminds me of a (very cyberpunk) short story I read in the late 90s in Asimov's, where a pair of super-hackers infiltrate a secrete bunker under the Gobi desert to find the same, populated by ethnicities the Chinese government made "disappear". (also the base of the cavern featured a pool of constructor ooze that evolved designs that would then be industrialized by China)

Wish I could remember the author and title, it's been sticking with me ever since.

Edit: Thanks to u/zem's hint, it's Taklamakan by Bruce Sterling, featured in Asimov's October 1998.

Bruce Sterling, one of his shaper/mechanist stories.

Huh. I haven't read anything else by him, though I've heard many gushing recommendations of his works (by other authors!). So that's up my list.

Edit: Awesome! It's Taklamakan by Bruce Sterling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taklamakan_(short_story)

check out "a good old-fashioned future" for a very nice sample of his work.

There's an older short story "Thirteen to Centaurus" by JG Ballard with an interesting take on this.

This is the plot of Ascension

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)

That sounds interesting. What is it called?

Although it's been done before, I suspect you were reading a M.R. Forbes novel :P

this is the premise of ascension. it was cancelled by netflix after 1 season

One time I boarded a 12 hour long international flight. The plane taxied out to the runway just as a dense fog was descending. It was deemed too dangerous to take off and too dangerous to even taxi back to the gate. It took all night for the fog to clear (over ten hours) so I definitely fell asleep and woke up again while we were still on the tarmac. Then we had to wait for them to restock all the drinks and food that had been consumed overnight before we could finally take off.

As someone who is profoundly uncomfortable in economy seats, but doesn't feel rich enough for upgrades most of the time, this sounds like my nightmare.

Fortunately for me this was one of only two times in my life I splurged for first class (mostly due to the length of the flight). They kept offering us champagne and extra snacks from economy, so that took the edge off quite a bit.

Stuck on a runway where nobody can see your plane through the fog sounds absolutely terrifying, like a setup for another Tenerife. I can just imagine traffic control changing shift, maybe they're sleep deprived or drunk, and the next thing you know another plane cuts straight through yours.

For people who didn't get what Tenerife referenced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

Similar at Linate in Milan, Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linate_Airport_disaster

Heh, there's a South Park episode where a medium uses (roughly) that scenario as an analogy of what it's like for a soul to be trapped in purgatory. Couldn't find the clip, but see the second paragraph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Celebrities#Plot

Edit: Actually, the whole episode uses that as a premise.

I don't think of myself as the kind of person to cause an "incident" but this might do it. A security escort out of that nightmare might be worth the consequences and embarrassment.

I'm skeptical of your story. They kept the passengers on the plane for 10 hours overnight just for fog? That kind of event is rare and only happens when there is extreme weather/disasters AND operational issues where there are no open gates.

This was flying out of New Delhi where I noticed several things were somewhat dysfunctional.

Also too dangerous to (slowly) drive a set of air stairs and busses out?

(I don't doubt that it happened; I just think someone decided it's easier/cheaper to not try to solve the problem.)

Just to try to provide a little more context on this.

This was in the wake of an unprecedented heatwave. The all-time record high temperature was set that day, and even though this was set in a different part of the country from where Caledonian Sleeper usually runs through, the unusually high temperatures covered a very wide area of the UK.

While trains can run without issue in these kinds of temperatures in other countries, the temperatures we saw over those two days exceeded the operational window much of the British network was designed and built for.

It looks like there were massive Overhead Line problems on the route the Sleeper normally takes (the West Coast Main Line), and it was too late to try to divert onto the alternative line the Sleeper uses (the East Coast Main Line). Although, the ECML was arguably faring worse at the time! These are the only two lines the Sleeper can use to get south.

On board the Caledonian Sleeper, you can fill in a breakfast card with items you want the next morning, but notably this card also includes options about being informed or not about disruption. So if you really want to be woken up en-route to be told about late running or cancellation, there should have been the option to do so for those whose priority is on-time running to London (versus those who are more flexible or less worried about their arrival time). It's not clear in this case whether the person from TFA used this option, or if they did and the process broke down in some way.

In retrospect it was probably foolhardy for CS to advise their customers that things would be running when so much around them was figuratively crashing to the ground. Ideally they would have pre-cancelled and allowed customers to make their own plans, which could have included using the train as a hotel overnight, as happened anyway.

Most train operators in the UK, including Caledonian Sleeper, operate a scheme called Delay Repay, which refunds users who start their journey and end up at their destination late. Terms differ per operator, e.g. some only pay out in circumstances that are their fault, some only pay out after 30 minutes of lateness. In this instance, Caledonian Sleeper start refunds after 30 minutes of delay, for any reason. So at least the overnight stay at Glasgow would have been free of charge!

This is actually surprising common in the anecdotal experience of myself and my family. (Common that the train never leaves the origin station, though once my mother slept all night in Euston!)

The rolling stock is pretty modern, but the locomotives appear to be quite unreliable. Finding a replacement at short notice is tricky. I’ve been a handful of services where this happened.

The sleeper is generally unreliable in addition to the locomotive situation. The highlander services travel almost the entire length of the country making chances of running into a local issue in an ageing and underfunded rail network quite common.

Usually this means you are woken in the small hours and put on the first ‘day time’ alternative.

> We made all efforts to support guests impacted, including providing overnight accommodation on board

Well, I guess that’s one way to justify the situation!

Although normally the flush toilets empty out onto the tracks, I trust this has been stopped. The track workers quite rightly didn’t like it.

One of the grimmest things at getting off of a train at Liverpool St station is the smell of train loos that had emptied out in the station.

In time I trust it will ebb away.

It's certainly stopped in the case of the Caledonian Sleeper; the new Mark 5 carriages have retention toilets like all other recent stock. I think the Mark 3A sleepers on the Night Riviera to Cornwall also came fitted with retention toilets from new in the 80s, but I wouldn't swear to it. Mark 3 day carriages definitely flushed onto the tracks, though those that are left are being retrofitted with tanks.

I always found the visible turds and toilet paper worse than the smell, but I haven't spent much time at Liverpool Street specifically.

I’ve caught the sleeper from London to Inverness. A fun experience but it was £800.

That’s a lot! I got it recently from London to Stirling. 3 of us travelled - 2 rooms with 2 bunks in each. It was £430 in total.

I would think the distance doesn’t affect the price since they can’t reuse the room. And I assume you pay per room too? My wife booked it so I’m not sure of the exact details. Maybe my assumptions are wrong!

There are wide variations in price: some advance purchase sleeper only fares are cheap; at the outside a full-price Anytime ticket plus a room supplement to use the sleeper could cost a fortune. And pricing is not straightforward once you start digging in: have a look at http://brfares.com/!expert?orig=EUS&dest=FTW for example...

I found out, the hard way, about how the UK Rail system works.

Apparently, if a train is delayed, the owner is fined per hour.

This incentivizes cancellation. I assume the train was canceled. No idea why they let the passengers sleep through. That's weird.

This is an object lesson on unintended consequences.

Presumably many of the travelers would have had no where else to spend the night, at least without incurring substantial expense.

So they saved the fines, and the need to pay for hotels.

Cancellations are fined. You may find this useful as a starting point for further reading. [1]

An object lesson on HN comments?

[1] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/industry-and-commercial/inform...

> Cancellations are fined. You may find this useful as a starting point for further reading. [1]
An object lesson on HN comments?

[1] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/industry-and-commercial/inform...

Thank you for the link. It introduces some good, empirical data to the conversation, and I am grateful for your contribution.

But are they fined the way that latenesses are?

> Each cancellation is worth a certain amount of ‘delay minutes’, which reflects the disruption that passengers face as a result of having to wait for the next train.

That sounds like a formula for exactly what I was talking about (I never said that the cancellation wasn't fined).

> An object lesson on HN comments?

Be nice. That extra line was completely unnecessary, and is, indeed, an object lesson on HN comments.

Here's another link for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

Have a nice day.

From Russia with love: https://ruverses.com/samuil-marshak/what-an-absent-minded-ma...

This could have been a more apt ending for Phileas Fogg.

Based on a prior art of classic Soviet children poem:

https://ruverses.com/samuil-marshak/what-an-absent-minded-ma...

Also the translation is a classic in Hebrew: https://www.kibutz-poalim.co.il/page_8975 While in the original version in Russian the main character heads out of St. Petersburg, in Hebrew version you have the old edition, where the train goes to Egypt, but as a train connection has been cut of, during the war, the later edition features train going from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Lemon scented napkins never smelt so good.

Edit:

Referring to HHGTTG:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/2sflZ6N9HJ144nxRqs...

Taking a sleeper train "to work" ... ouch. How does that even work?

leave your home in the evening, arrive in the city where your office is in the morning. i did that a few times when i had to attend in-person meetings in a remote location that was just an over-night train away.

The same way people take red-eye flights to work. Pack a bag.

It’s not uncommon in the UK to have a house in the countryside and an apartment in the city where they work.

I can see such people using the sleeper train to London, work for a few days there, sleeping in their apartment, and returning using another sleeper train.

Maybe he’s a dreamer?

Long ago I had a coworker that would fly to work a few times a week. He lived back east and could make it to the offices in the west coast fairly early in the morning. Of course, this was in the days when the internet was in its infancy and long distance phone calls still cost an arm and a leg.

We went on holiday to London and got the sleeper back. Get on the train at 9pm, get some sleep. The train arrived in our home city at 5am. One hour before your destination you are woken up with breakfast. The room is small, with bunk beds, but it has an en-suite bathroom including a shower.

Note: the train does not go slowly. I imagined a sauntering pace through the countryside, but the thing pelted through.

It is stunning that this person went to sleep before the train left the station, even more so on a day that apparently had seen some disruptions on tracks already. It feels important to me to hear any announcements and ensure everything is "on track" before going to relax and sleep.

You'd hope that a passenger could establish the train was on track...before they got on!!

Come on did no one get the joke?!

Why? The article said he's been using the service for 15 years. At some point you just fall into a groove. Just like frequent fliers that zonk out before the plane takes off, and wake up upon landing.

Why? because then you end up surprised of not having traveled anywhere a few hours later because you missed an important announcement

You can board the sleeper in Glasgow any time starting 2200, with the expected departure time 2340, and arrival in Euston 0707, last vacate-the-train time 0730. If you are used to using the service and want to get a reasonable 8 hours sleep then it's totally reasonable to board and go to sleep well before the expected departure time -- indeed, that's part of why they let you board early. Plus, suppose that it was 2340 or later, and they informed you that the train wasn't going anywhere -- by that time of night "sleep on the train and figure out a plan B in the morning" is probably your best bet anyway.

Some people take sleeping tablets to help them get to sleep, although I wouldn’t thought that would be much of a thing these days.

Am I the only person who wonders how someone could sleep so deeply that they don't notice the train never moved? I'm guessing he was on ambien or something?

It could have been worse, he could have woken up at some town in the middle of the journey.

> Am I the only person who wonders how someone could sleep so deeply that they don't notice the train never moved?

When I sleep at night, I never wake up due to my house staying in place. Why would it be different on a train?

Fair, but if your house were to move to Glasgow whilst you were asleep, I bet you'd wake up.

Noticing something didn't happen is much harder than noticing something did, particularly when you are sleeping.

My joke, which clearly missed, was about expectation. Not waking up because your house remains still (as you expect it to) is different than sleeping a train you're expecting to, at some point, be moving and undulating. I say this as a person who falls asleep in moving vehicles—and wakes up if they stop for more than a few minutes.

I can't sleep in anything that moves even slightly. I was on a ferry when it was stuck in ice. I had been awake since the morning before, I couldn't sleep on the ferry even immobile due to any vibration.

If I was on a train I'd feel any motion no matter how smooth.

Right, but that just emphasizes the parent comment: if there’s nothing to disturb your sleep, why would you wake up to notice the train isn’t moving.

Once you're asleep you're unlikely to be aware the train has moved or stopped. I got the sleeper to Exeter sometimes (not sure it still exists, this is over a decade ago and it wasn't advertised even then). If I fell asleep at paddington I wouldn't wake up when we (didn't) move. Similarly, it got to exeter around 5am but didn't leave until 7ish, you could select when they woke you up: on arrival or 30min before departure. I never woke thinking "we've not moving when we should be"

If you mean the through sleeper to Penzance then yes, that still runs and the down train still seems to be booked to stand for almost an hour at Exeter, but it now departs around 4-ish, so quite a bit earlier. Going the other way it stays in the platform at Paddington for quite a while, so while it's booked to arrive shortly after 5:00, you can stay on until around 7-ish.

One interesting thing I've seen in older timetables (late 70s / early 80s) is that in some intermediate locations (e.g. Carlisle) they apparently did the same thing with through carriages which were then shunted onto/off the main sleeper train in order to let passengers from that station board earlier/sleep longer than would be possible based on the arrival/departure times of the main portion of that train.

I think one of the main purposes of sleep is that your mind shuts down and you have no clue what happens during that time.

Anything else and it wouldn’t be sleep.

For some reason, your comment reminded me of one time in elementary school. I got some from school around 3:30, felt tired and then went straight to bed. I woke up around 8:00 and started freaking out, thinking that I had woken up at 8AM instead of 8PM (the sun was still out and resembled the sunrise). I rushed to get my stuff ready to leave for school and went downstairs. Saw my dad just sitting there, so I yelled at him that I'm going to be late for school and why didn't he wake me up. He gave me a confused look and said, " I guess you slept well, it's 8PM."

Been there. Switched to 24-hour time (8:30 PM = 2030).

Now I'm only annoyed by the number of devices, applications, and people that don't support 24-hour time. :)

That's not how sleep works at all. Your sleep goes through many different phases and your brain is continually monitoring its surroundings for danger[0]. The reason why you feel like your mind is shut down is because, on a normal night of sleeping in your comfy home, nothing extraordinary happens. Try sleeping in the wild, it will be a whole different experience.

[0] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2022/01/06/JNEUROSCI...

The wild is a very different environment from a train ridden by a dude with years of acclimation to it.

A comfortable train seat or train bed is definitely a place where a tired person can and will ass out. I’ve slept through a plane takeoff and food service and thought 5 minutes passed, only to realize it’d been hours.

> thought 5 minutes passed, only to realize it’d been hours.

When my son was eleven, I took him on a flight from NYC to JNB. He passed out after the dinner service, somewhere near Bermuda. He then complained to me that he couldn't get to sleep... as we were just crossing the coast of Angola. He absolutely refused to believe me that he'd been asleep for about ten hours.

I managed to sleep and snore while watching some music videos on my phone in bed. I could swear that I didn't sleep, but my gf had other opinion. It's also common for me to do midday nap and still hear everything that goes around me.

The article mentions that he had been using the Sleeper train for 15 years, so I imagine he's used to it.

Maybe because it wasn't moving, he slept more deeply than usual?

every night when i sleep, i call the process "shutting down". i do NOT hear or feel anything, my family members have to rage shake me to get me up in the middle of the night if there is an emergency, earthquake or something of that sort. i NEVER hear the alarm clock in the morning or during the night, that means like last month i had to catch a 4 AM flight and i could not guarantee that i would get up at 2am, change and leave so i did the next best thing, i stayed up all night. (this was when i was alone for some reason)

i listen to audiobooks when i am "Falling asleep", been doing that for the last decade, without fail. one time my phone broke and i felt "weird" sleeping without some narrator speaking to me.

the rage shake thing, that is real. funny thing, i can sometimes "hear, like being in a well and looking out kind of feeling, but can't put 2 and 2 together with regards to something is trying to wake me up"...

I was in an earthquake once and only woke up when I hit the floor

funny. i remember falling from the bed and speaking some expletives and jumping back up automatically. no in the moment attention towards what had happened or why

I wonder if this is a result of some kind of sleep paralysis?

dont know.... i have read about sleep paralysis but i cannot remember any of the symptoms.

in our culture, we have the story of the sleep entity which is akin to sleep paralysis in all of its symptoms but i've never felt that.

the "shutting down" thing for me is because in the morning, like most people there is no sense of passage of time but generally no dreams also. its like you wink and boom, 8 hours have passed.

my mum has the lightest sleep on the contrary. we can walk outside their room, on tiptoes and flick a switch and mum is out in 2 seconds. polar opposite.

back many many years ago, i was into the whole lucid dreaming thing and boy that was amazing. then when inception came up, the two connected and it felt quite great but it petered out somehow and i have yet to get that mojo back... sad

I have the same problem. I have become immune to alarm clocks. Sometimes I wake up late, and notice that my alarm never went off, for a time I thought there was some bug with iOS until I realised that I was turning off the alarm in my sleep and not remembering doing so. Other times, I just completely sleep through the alarm.

oooo... i have a suggestion. it is janky but it works but i am too lazy to keep up with this.

it can be a million dollar app idea so saddle up.

>I have become immune to alarm clocks

100% me but i've found a cheat. i have observed i am immune to the alarm "tune" itself and not the loudness of it. my tests revealed if i change the alarm tone without listening to it first, the next morning i do "hear it".

for the app itself, if there was an alarm clock app that does "random tune", that would be it. i remember back in 2010-13 there was this IOS alarm app, sunrise or something. they had that. sadly after going over to android, i have yet to find an alternative.

and yes, i have tried those radio alarm clocks, they just drain the battery and the selection of music is not always suited for waking up so it doesnt matter.

try it just now. put your phone to mute/low audio and randomly select an alarm tune without reading/hearing what it is. you should "hear" it in the morning

I fell asleep before take-off in Canada (YYZ) for the UK (LHR) a few months ago. I slept most of the way; it was only through conversation afterwards that I found out there was almost a 3h delay before we even started taxiing.

If you're saying you have awareness while sleeping of something that should happen, and you'll wake up if you don't detect it, I certainly don't share that.

You're not alone, but I think we're in the minority. If I were expecting to be moving all night, I'm confident that the stillness would eventually disturb me. I tend to wake up to any unexpected noise or movement.

I get this, but do you wake up due to lack of expected noise or movement?

I'm struggling to understand the mechanics of being disturbed by stillness.

Having traveled overnight on trains several times, I can confirm that I would regularly wake up when the train stopped at a station. But this was probably because the train's state _changed_ from moving to stopped. In this case, since the train presumably never even started, I can understand why the passenger didn't wake up.

Doesn’t seem odd to me; I’ve slept through customs stops and other events on sleeper trains in the past. I’ve fallen asleep in busy hotel lobbies and often fall asleep on planes before takeoff.

It's pretty normal to have a few beers before boarding that train. You sleep like the dead.

I would at least check that the train is indeed leaving before going to sleep. Even more on a day when there were disruptions. It is at least important to be able to hear any announcements.

I've slept through aeroplane take-offs. Landings normally wake me up with a jolt though.

I've slept on the train plenty of times.

Once you get used to the journey I honestly don't know how, but you often wake up just before you stop. Fortunately I've not missed my stop when sober.

I'm sure the first few journeys would be harder to sleep through, but once you get used to it, it would be weird to not fall asleep if you plan it as rest time.

I just don't think I could fall asleep in Glasgow though...

I was able to do this on Amtrak on a particularly hell commute. Get on train, get seat, zonk out. Wake up a stop or 2 before mine. Felt like some kind of super power.

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