Late again.

The trains were over 15 minutes late this morning.
I am thinking about adding all the time up that they are late and working out how many hours of my life are stolen by Southeastern.
But I think if I do I might just go a bit postal and go on a rampage though the head office.

The reason the train was late was due to a tree on the line at Tonbridge, a signal failure in the Hither Green area and congestion at London bridge.
I think the real reason was that it rained a little bit this morning.

The Muppet announcer at Cannon street had a field day he was so excited relaying all the problems that he forgot to mention that we "should not leave any luggage unattended on the train or platform" or "please have your travel cards ready for inspection at the gate line" like any of the half wits sitting on the gates ever look at your tickets.
They just stand there looking like someone you would expect to see in a freak show audition queue doing their best to ignore you if the gate doesn't accept your tickets.

I still think I will start to top up the time that is wasted on the train. I will see how we go for a month, if it makes me cry I might stop.

The magnetic power of bridges.

I managed to make my early train home on Monday and guess what it was late. By only 15 minutes which is not bad really I mean that only adds up to 2 and 1/2 hours a week extra on the train if they keep this up.

Then amazingly I managed to make my early train on Tuesday I thought that's well it won't be late this time not with southeasterns 98% trains on time success rate. But noooo the train left London Bridge got up to a grand speed of about 20 miles an hour then slowed down to about 5 and didn't get any faster.
I was lucky enough to be standing (you cannot get a seat if you don't get to the train 20 minutes before it goes) in the aisle to listen to the guard ring the driver and ask what was going on.
The train was running on a caution (whatever that means maybe it had been bad before and was close to getting a train ASBO).
Then after another agonising 10 minutes to travel 2 miles he gets on the blower and talks to the driver again.
The excuse broadcast to the train was that someone has hit a bridge. I don't know if he made it up or its true but I must have heard the same excuse at least 12 times in the last 4 years.
So my questions are:
What kind of magnetic materials are they using that draw in cars that would normally manage to drive through the big gap in the middle?
Do the drivers of trains really get a message from the signal men/women or do they just have a little book of excuses that they use?
Where do southeastern get there statistics from? Do they use the Sex Panther (Anchorman film) statistics of "They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works, every time."