… day that was today. I never ever thought that I’d reach Leuven.

It all started off well too. I was up as the first alarm went off, made the coffee, made my butties, packed the food, had a shower, took out the rubbish, bleached the sink and the toilet and so on and by the time 08:00 came I was all ready to go.

And I didn’t get very far along my road before I stopped.

It’s daylight of course, so it’s pretty easy to see everything that is going on, and it looks as if I’ve arrived just in time to witness the opening of the gates to the port de plaisance around the corner.

A pile of the yachts that have been moored in there are all streaming out to sea right now, accompanied by the odd little fishing boat.

The interesting thing in this photograph is where Chausiaise is moored. With one of the Joly France boats moored at the ferry terminal, she’s had to move and now she’s moored up right by the harbour gates.

f you look closely, her crane is fully extended and there is a big load of merchandise on the quayside in the process of being loaded up.

And a little further on down the hill I came to another halt.

For the last while, the sailing ship Marité has been sailing out and about and we haven’t seen all that much of her. But now she’s come back to port and is moored up in her little corner.

One of these days I’ll go for a sail around on board her, and in fact I already might have done had the people in attendance been any more friendly. Too busy to talk to potential customers, their response is “it’s all on the web site” to whatever question you pose, and then they go back to gossipping amongst themselves.

It often makes me wonder if they are Belgian.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the last time we were on our way to the railway station we saw them making a new entrance into the car park from the Rue du Moulin, and we wondered why.

As usual the passage of time reveals the answer to all of our questions. The cliff here is slowly collapsing into the road causing a danger to passing pedestrians and motorists and has been fenced off.

And the reason for the new entrance to the car park is so that vehicles and pedestrians can pass up and down the Rue du Moulin without exposing themselves to any danger.

The only danger that I was risking was the soft ash and gravel and the steps up to the road at the end of the Parc des Val es Fleurs. I’m glad that my suitcase wasn’t all that heavy.

But this is a sight which, although expected, still fills me full of dismay.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that we have seen railway lines dotted all around the town centre and in the harbour, relics of the days when there were the deep-sea trawlers here fishing the Grand Banks bringing in tonne after tonne after tonne of cod.

There was even a passenger train service from the quayside up to near the mainline railway station at one time.

But with the end of deep-sea fishing on the Grand Banks in 1992 the railway line has fallen into disrepair and bits of it have been pulled up here and there.

However, now the link between the main line and the port is being ripped out. And so any thought that we might have had about services being reinstated at some point or other in the future are now over.

As I expected, it was something of a struggle to reach the station this morning. I’m still not 100% fit – far from it – and how I wish that we were back 12 months ago when I was running around like a spring chicken.

As I walked up from the old railway line I could see my train pulling into the railway station up here in Granville. It’s early this morning – more than 20 minutes before departure. Usually it pulls into the station with about 10 minutes to go.

There were quite a few people waiting for it today. “Holidaymakers fed up with the weather and going home” I thought to myself as I headed onto the platform.

When I stepped onto the platform I took a photo of the train parked up here in the station, only to find that my carriage was right down at the far end of the platform.

So dragging my suitcase behind me, I set off down the platform.

My train is actually 2 train sets coupled together. My part of the train is in the second trainset – the very front carriage in fact.

At least it means that I don’t have far to walk at the other end of the journey in Paris.

I headed to my carriage and clambered aboard, to be greeted with the bad news “there’s an accident on the line. We’re going to set off on time but I’ve no idea how we would proceed”.

Our train made it as far as Argentan when it ground to a halt, and we sat and waited … and waited … and waited … and after about an hour or so we started again.

We then ground to a halt in Surdon and there we sat and waited … and waited … and after about half an hour we set off.

With all of these pauses I’d profited by bringing up to date yesterday’s blog entry and cleaning the hard drive a little, and also having a little snooze while I was at it. I fell asleep again a little later but was shocked out of my sleep as the train swayed violently on points at Versailles and the laptop fell to the floor.

Look at the time on the clock here. Our arrival time is supposed to be 12:06 but now it’s almost 13:45 so it’s almost 100 minutes late.

And one thing that I never noticed before is that the front power car of my unit has a different number than the rear unit of my power car. You can see the number here – 84570 – but if you look at the previous photo, the power car on the other end of my unit is 84569.

Alongside it by the way is something that we haven’t seen too much of and which I have yet to travel – one of the 3rd Generation RGV 2N2-3UFC TGVs that were introduced starting at the end of 2011..

They spend most of their time travelling out of the Gare du Lyon and the Gare de L’Est but recently they have started appearing on the Montparnasse-Bordeaux-Toulouse and a couple of other routes out of there.

By now my connection had long gone. I hurried as much as I could across the city and at the Gare du Nord had to queue to see what they could do for me.

And that ended up being something of a disaster. Despite the fact that there was a direct train from Paris to Brussels parked at a platform, the booking clerk refused to let me travel on it and gave me a booking from Paris to Lille.

“What do I do in Lille?”
“You have to go to see the people at the office there”
“What? And go through all of this procedure again?”
“Yes”.

Absolutely absurd, and I told him exactly what I thought of the situation.

So nothing much could be done from my point of view and I had no legal alternative but to take the train to Lille.

There was something of a wait, which enabled me to find a seat and eat my sandwiches. But not one of the power points around me were working so that was that from my point of view.

Eventually the number of the platform for my train was posted and I could make my way down there to board it.

The train that was here waiting for us was one of the TGV POS train units that have made their way to the Gare du Nord from their old stamping grounds in the east of the country and in Southern Germany

And as you might expect, my carriage is right down the far end of the platform

The train consists of trainsets, of which we have seen the first part but the second part, in which my seat might be found, is actually a TGV Reseau Duplex unit, and I’m not sure about the wisdom of coupling up two units of different types for continual high-speed running.

And just look at the rain teeming down. With having all of this time to wait I would have loved to have gone out for a walk and ake a few photos, but I’m going nowhere unnecessary in all of this.

When the train pulled into Lille Flanders I legged it down to Lille Europe, ignoring the rain, and went to join another queue where I went through the same procedure with yet another intransigent booking clerk

All that she was prepared to offer me was a seat on th 18:08 service to Brussels – another wait of over an hour. So bang goes any hope of doing any shopping.

The trainset that pulls in for me is a TGV Réseau 38000 tri-volt, one of the PBA – Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam – trainsets.

Of course I have no seat allocated to me but right at the front (or the rear) are little quiet rooms with a couple of seats in them so I made my way there and settled down.

When I arrived at Brussels-Midi I nipped into the Delhaize in the basement because that was still open. Down there I bought a falafel salad and something to drink, and I’ll do my main shopping tomorrow morning.

There had been a couple of trains to Leuven called while I was doing my shopping, but I wasn’t going to run for them.

There was a train to Hasselt leaving at 19:11 so I set my sights on that one. When it pulled into the station it was one of the push-me pull-you units which I still think is not a good idea for high-speed running to have a heavy power unit pushing a long train.

And it’s the pushing end that pulls up first into the station with a large rake of double-deck carriages behind it. I find another quiet corner and settle myself down, rueing my bad luck.

And having travelled all this way on a variety of different trains, this was the first time that I had my ticket checked by a ticket collector.

As we sweep through Schaerbeek Station I notice that we are taking the older, right-hand track towards Leuven.

That’s the one that’s going to take us past the scrapyard at Haren where we can have a look and see what’s turned up in there waiting to be cut up.

The first thing that I saw through the rain drops on the window and the teeming rainstorm was some of the fleet of Class 55 diesels that have been there for a while.

Worn-out and graffiti-streaked, they are not far short of being 60 years old. The mainstay of long-distance heavy passenger and freight trains in the pre-electrification days, 42 of them were built by BN and fitted with General Motors 567C V16 diesels.

As we pass more of them waiting for the cutter’s torch, their longevity is due to the fact that the engines are not only so reliable, having been built between 1938 and 1966, but that GM has such faith in them that spares are still being manufactured.

We can all (or most of us) remember the British versions of these that appeared on British Railways.

Fitted with an ersatz engine made under licence by various British companies, the narrowness of the British loading gauge meant that the engines had to be fitted in upside-down. This meant that even a simple job like changing the oil and oil filter was an “engine out” job.

That, and the general poor construction, meant that some of them didn’t even last 10 years and the longest-lasting (excluding those that struggled into preservation) just about managed 13 years before it was cut up.

When we pulled into Leuven I could see what there was that was pushing me along, as if I hadn’t already guessed.

It’s one of the Class 18 electrics – the “Class 55 of the electric service” – the workhorses of the SNCB passenger services

On the way to my digs I picked up a bag of chips and they went down well with my falafel salad.

Now that I’ve eaten my tea, I’m off to bed. I’m completely exhausted after my long and difficult day.

But don’t worry about the photos. You’ll see them tomorrow. I’m far too tired to deal with them right now.