Norwegian Travel Worries
Oct. 9th, 2024 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeIt was a difficult day to be a remote travel agent. Lisa and Chris were in Oslo, planning to take the Bergensbahen (Oslo-Bergen) train on Thursday. However, the line was closed due to one of the snowsheds along the line having caught fire on October 7. They need to be in Bergen by early afternoon on October 11 to catch a ferry from Bergen NO to Hirtshals DK. To get to Bergen, they needed to make their 08:25 train on October 10, for which they had a reservation.
I took a nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon, knowing that I was going to have to be in a place to possibly redo some of their hotel reservations. One possibility would be to go to Stavanger instead of Bergen, spend the night there, and then catch that same ferry (which calls at Stavanger on the way to Hirtshals), albeit that this would throw away half of their booked ferry journey.
As of twenty minutes after their booked departure time of 08:25 CEDT, it appeared (as far as I could tell from here) that their train for Bergen had left. The infrastructure operator, Bane NOR, had been frantically working to reopen the section of the line that closed. They originally predicted a 03:00 reopening, which kept slipping, and as of the time I gave up and went to bed (having heard nothing from Lisa or Chris for a while; remember that they don't have mobile phones and only limited email connectivity) the reopening had slipped until at least 09:00. (The closed section was several hours west of Olso, starting at Ål.) Even if they couldn't get the line open by the time the train got there, Vy (the train operator) had a two-plus-hour bus bridge around the closed section, but that's also not optimal.
I know that had I been in their shoes, I would have got on that train and hoped for the best.
I took a nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon, knowing that I was going to have to be in a place to possibly redo some of their hotel reservations. One possibility would be to go to Stavanger instead of Bergen, spend the night there, and then catch that same ferry (which calls at Stavanger on the way to Hirtshals), albeit that this would throw away half of their booked ferry journey.
As of twenty minutes after their booked departure time of 08:25 CEDT, it appeared (as far as I could tell from here) that their train for Bergen had left. The infrastructure operator, Bane NOR, had been frantically working to reopen the section of the line that closed. They originally predicted a 03:00 reopening, which kept slipping, and as of the time I gave up and went to bed (having heard nothing from Lisa or Chris for a while; remember that they don't have mobile phones and only limited email connectivity) the reopening had slipped until at least 09:00. (The closed section was several hours west of Olso, starting at Ål.) Even if they couldn't get the line open by the time the train got there, Vy (the train operator) had a two-plus-hour bus bridge around the closed section, but that's also not optimal.
I know that had I been in their shoes, I would have got on that train and hoped for the best.
