Train passengers yesterday branded London’s Euston station as ‘Like Squid Game but with a Boots’ as they faced a day of hellish delays.
Commuters were fuming as they stood shoulder to shoulder inside the ‘dangerously overcrowded’ station as people reported seeing megaphones and police being used for crowd control.
Others described chaotic scenes as people made the ‘terrifying’ dash to their platform with just a minute’s notice after cramming round ‘a few 1980s TV screens’ for updates on their trains.
The misery did not end for some passengers once on board their trains with a video showing rainwater dripping from the roof of a Avanti West Coast service heading to Glasgow.
‘Carriage C is leaking like a sieve every time the train brakes or goes round a corner,’ one passenger wrote on X.
‘With the price of train tickets absolutely unacceptable.’
Another picture showed cloths stuck to the ceiling with yellow tape in a bid to stem the flow of the leaking roof.
Others were ‘treated like cattle’ as they were forced to stand or sit on the floor of the 1445 London Northwestern Railway service to Crewe.
One traveller spoke of how he missed his train when he backed out after being ‘crushed’ in the crowds stampeding to the platform.
The travel nightmare continued into the evening with National Rail warning of hour-long delays in and out of Euston until the end of the day caused by a trespasser blocking some lines.
Avanti West Coast services between Euston and Wolverhampton, Liverpool Lime Street, and Glasgow Central were all disrupted.
While the London Northwestern Railway faced delays between Euston and Milton Keynes Central, Northampton, Rugby, and Crewe.
Meanwhile, a fault on a train tonight disrupted Overground services between the embattled station and Watford Junction.
One fuming passenger wrote on X that they had never seen the station as crazy as this.
‘Megaphones and police being used for crowd control,’ they said. ‘Gateline shut because of a train being full and standing to Crewe. This is not my idea of a safe environment, and I work to this station.’
Others compared the dash to the platform to the dystopian survival thriller Netflix show Squid Game.
‘The sheer angst of staring at the board until they announce the platform with three minutes until your train. Like Squid Games but with a Boots,’ they wrote.
One passenger said the ‘mad dash’ was ‘not safe, and it’s even less safe for the elderly or less able. A public service that endangers the public’.
Another passenger slammed the ‘horrendous scenes’ as people ‘pushed and shoved’ through the overcrowded station.
They said: ‘Now totally overcrowded station hundreds of people pushing & shoving far too many people no crowd control dreadful potentially very dangerous to have that many people never travel on a Sunday in the Uk.’
And Euston station was branded as ‘easily the worst station in western Europe’.
‘It’s like being taken away to be machine gunned in the woods by various mobile phone and soft drinks companies,’ one person said. ‘Congrats to everyone involved.’
One commuter added on X: ‘It’s an assault on the senses and everything about it feels deliberately designed to torment the human brain.
‘It was so hideous one time that I chose to stand outside in the peeing rain.’
A conductor was forced to repeatedly apologise as people described being ‘dangerously overcrowded’ on one LNR train.
‘The conductor apologising repeatedly, clearly embarrassed,’ a commuter said.
‘2024, and we’re still being scammed by rail companies who only care about ripping people off.’
has contacted Avanti West Coast and LNR for comment.