Preston taxi drivers talk about taking train passengers home to Scotland

Lancashire Post

More than 100 taxi drivers were called with no notice to take train passengers home after Avanti West Coast cancelled a Longton-Edinburgh service at Preston. This is how they felt.

Transcript

00:00 I'm at Preston train station today. I've come to speak to some of the taxi drivers who were

00:09 called to action at short notice on Monday night when the Avanti West Coast, they pulled

00:16 the train service at Preston, it was going from London to Scotland and they had to take

00:22 passengers by road all the way to places like Edinburgh, Carlisle, Kendal and Dundee.

00:28 My name is Mohammed Ayub and I've been a taxi driver for nearly 20 years now.

00:33 And so what happened on Monday night then? Did you get a message and you responded to

00:37 it?

00:38 Yeah, I got a message in the WhatsApp group saying all the trains were down, which I knew

00:42 about it, but I was invited for a meal somewhere. So I went for a meal, then I had a bit of

00:46 sleep and then 10.30 the phone was still going off. So basically I come out and I got a job

00:51 to Dundee.

00:52 And what was that like? Was that a long journey?

00:54 It was a long journey, four hours or just over four hours there, four hours back plus

00:59 an hour's break on the way.

01:02 How many passengers did you have?

01:04 Just one passenger because there was only one person going to Dundee.

01:06 And what was the atmosphere like then?

01:09 The atmosphere was really good because all the lads, they put their energy into it and

01:14 they look forward to these kind of jobs as well.

01:17 Yeah, and does it happen quite often then?

01:19 It does to be honest, every few months I think we end up going towards the north and sometimes

01:26 down south as well.

01:27 And is it quite well organised then when that happens?

01:30 Yeah, I think station manager Shirley Ross, she's always in touch with us and she's one

01:36 of the nicest persons you'll ever meet. So yeah, it's all good.

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