Trying to get home from London to Birmingham when it was snowing and on the old virgin train mainline. This was before we could easily lookup National Rail on our phones.

I guess I expected it to be long but god it was looong. Took over 3 hours to get to Coventry. Unfortunately, the speaker was not working in our carriage (didn't realise at the time) so we missed the announcement that the train was skipping past Birmingham so you should get off here. Could see lots of people getting off the other carriages so you could tell something was up but by the time at realised the train left.

Could see we were going a different way as I had never heard of the stations we went past. Ended up in Stafford. I knew it was outside of Birmingham but couldn't remember which direction. Still hadn't figured out the speaker wasnt working and was like, surely it's just another route to Birmingham. Luckily someone on the carriage realised we were North of Birmingham and asked the guard what was happening. He told us the story so most of our carriage then got off.

So now we were in Stafford trying to figure out the way to Birmingham. Of course, the trains were delayed that way too.

It ended up taking 8 hours to get from London to Birmingham. I think 2 hours of that was due to the broken speaker on our carriage.