A passenger travelling to Edinburgh has told how she forked out £400 with other commuters who were stuck in Newcastle due to train cancellations.
Amy Moloney, 28, had booked a train back to the capital for November 18 but due to the torrential rain and bad weather, many services on the east coast were cancelled.
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LNER who run the Edinburgh to Newcastle service set up a replacement bus service but due to the volume of customers stranded, the queues turned chaotic and Amy had no idea how she was going to get home.
The criminology student was beginning to panic when a couple of kind strangers said they were going to split the price of a taxi back to Edinburgh which cost around £400.
Speaking to Edinburgh Live Amy said: "I spoke to a couple of other people who said they were going for the bus to Edinburgh. I followed them, as I’m not from Newcastle and so I don’t know the area, so I didn’t know where to get the bus.
"When I walked outside the station and found the queue, I was told the next bus wasn’t departing until 4 pm. I was really starting to panic at this point as I was on my own in a city I’m unfamiliar with, and just wanted to get home.
"The queue was absolutely massive and snaked all along the building, plus it was getting longer by the minute.
"A group of girls overheard me talking to a woman in the queue and said they had one space left in a taxi going to Edinburgh and asked if I wanted to join them. I said yes and I jumped in."
She continued: "The journey took about 3 hours from Newcastle back to Edinburgh. two hours into the journey and two hours after my train was supposed to depart, I finally received a notification from my LNER app telling me my train was cancelled. Until then it had just been showing as ‘delayed’.
"I tweeted LNER and asked if I could get compensation for my share of the taxi (which came to £400 after we divided it into £50 between us) and they said no because they were running a bus service.
"The queues inside the station and for the bus were chaotic, and honestly if I’d stayed in that queue, I would probably still be there. Nobody seemed to know what was happening or where to go, it was madness."
Finally, she explained: "I couldn’t even use my train ticket on another service, as it seemed like every service to Edinburgh or Scotland was being cancelled.
"I’m not blaming the train companies for the weather as I know they can’t control it, but it was just frustrating to wait over an hour on a ‘delayed’ train, just for all of them to be cancelled."
The line between Edinburgh and Newcastle has been experiencing major disruption all day, with LNER also advising customers to avoid travelling on that particular route.
The Met Office issued a yellow weather warning for Edinburgh and the Lothians until 6 pm on Friday, November 18 with a high risk of flooding. There have been many delays to both public transport and rail services due to the weather.
LNER have been approached for comment.
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