At almost the last possible moment it could have been announced, there will be a (nearly) nationwide rail strike on Saturday 8th October. This, of course, is the Saturday of UK PonyCon weekend. It's not good news at all in that sense. Louder Yay really isn't the place to go into the political aspects of the long-running rail dispute, but it certainly is the place to talk about practicalities affecting Pony events.
It's likely that very few trains will run on that Saturday. Whether there'll be any service at all to and from Nottingham remains to be seen, but similar past strikes have seen a skeleton service on a minority of lines only, with not a lot moving anywhere after early evening. In other words, if you're commuting into UKPC on Saturday, I'm afraid you're likely to have to find a way to do it other than by train.
I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of East Midlands bus and coach services [For shame, Logan! —Ed.] and so I can't give specifics here of what alternatives there may be. National Express may be of some use, as may Megabus. Of course some attendees will be coming by car, in which case the rail strike won't affect them directly except perhaps to make some roads a bit busier on Saturday.
As far as my own weekend is concerned, fortunately I'm travelling out to Nottingham on Friday, when there should be a normal rail service. Frankly, if I'd been planning to do what I did last year and go up first thing on Saturday, I might well now be looking at not being able to attend at all. Any strike date will affect someone, of course. But from a selfish MLP perspective, it's a big blow that it's this date.
If there are any major developments, I'll try to keep people here posted. But the main takeaway right now is pretty simple: if you were planning on travelling to UK PonyCon by train on Saturday 8th, you may need to make substantial changes to those plans. I hope you can find an alternative that works for you.
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