A Cambridge mother and son were forced to spend the night on a “freezing cold” train after weather conditions and power failures meant they were stranded at the station. Lorentinah Kaseke said it was a “traumatising experience” having to spend the night on the train with "nowhere to go” or any other way to get home.

Lorentinah Kaseke, from Cambridge, and her 10-year-old son, Joel Kaseke, had been visiting London for the day on Sunday, December 11 to celebrate Joel’s birthday. They met their family in London to enjoy go-karting before making their way back to Cambridge later that day.

On the way home, they travelled from London Kings Cross to Hitchin and from Hitchin train station got a replacement bus service to Royston train station. Here they were planning to get the 9.49pm train to Cambridge but were told it was no longer running.

Feature:

When I was working for Cambridgeshire Live as a news reporter we were contacted by Lorentinah who said she had spent the night on a train with her son. As I was on the early shift of the day, I picked up the email and quickly got in contact with Lorentinah to ask for an interview. She was more than happy to speak about the experience with her son and just a few hours after the ordeal we had an interview over the phone.

I made sure to gather all the relevant information, including the times of travel, train lines used and when the train stopped, along with the relevant train stations. I made a note of the strongest quotes from Lorentinah as I asked her about the experience, with care and sensitivity, given the unfortunate experience. I promptly arranged one of our photographers to take some photos of Lorentinah and her son in their home, enabling the story to have a strong visual impact. We were given permission from Lorentinah for her son to be photographed and named in the article.

After retrieving all the information and quotes from Lorentinah on what happened, I contacted Thameslink and Great Northern, and Network Rail for a comment, giving them a substantial amount of time to respond. I included everything that is necessary for them to provide a comment in response, including any claims made by Lorentinah, such as when the train stopped, how the train company was unable to arrange alternative travel and that her son was given jackets to use as he fell asleep on the train, along with quotes from Lorentinah.

On this occasion, Thameslink and Great Northern, and Network Rail quickly responded with a comment that I included in the article and we were able to publish. However, if they had not responded as quickly as they did it would have been right to hold off publishing the story until the train companies had enough time to respond. A follow up call or email would have been appropriate to follow up on their comment to ensure they had a right to reply.

This story gained over 18K page views for Cambridgeshire Live, and was featured on the online homepage and in Cambridge News newspaper. (Unfortunately I don’t have access to show this as the story was from December 2022 and I didn’t take screenshots or save pdfs at the time).

It won ‘simply the best’ in the weekly Reach regional acknowledgements at the time and was picked up by the Mirror, which also made their frontpage online. My story was also published on ITV News and Express. These publishers also used the same photographs that we had taken and used.