It would, little more than a week ago, have been every commuter's idea of the journey from hell, writes Stephen Deal.

The 7.29am service from Didcot to London's Paddington station normally drops passengers off in the capital just 43 minutes later.

When I travelled on the temporary revised route yesterday, it took us a full one hour and 43 minutes to get to the same destination.

But the one thing we didn't hear was many commuters moan about the fact - because, tragically, we all now know just what exactly a journey from hell really is. Photographer Jon Lewis and I put ourselves in the commuters' shoes and joined dozens of passengers who catch the 7.29 Great Western train service yesterday.

Having travelled on the same service just 24 hours after the awful crash last week, the first thing I noticed was how quickly the need to get back to work has returned.

Wednesday's service was less than half-full - by yesterday, it was once again difficult to find a seat. The service pulled out of Didcot Parkway at 7.30 and, like most early morning commuter trains, most of the smartly dressed men and women immediately buried themselves in their morning papers without little more than a glance at who else was on the train.

Like last Wednesday, most tended to avoid reading the latest news on the crash and instead preferred to reflect on how Jonah Lomu had gone some way to destroying's England's rugby hopes or how Sweden had thrown our footballers a lifeline.

I spoke to one group of commuters about their travel plans and all knew exactly how best to reach their destination. None minded the revised arrangements, reflecting on how much worse things can be. The choice when we arrived at Reading at 7.51 was either to carry on travelling as far as Ealing Broadway or catch a connecting train to Waterloo. We opted, like the vast majority of commuters, to stay on the train.

We arrived at Ealing Broadway at 8.16 - already four minutes behind the time we would have pulled in at Paddington - and were quite unprepared for the sea of humanity which met us.

Quite simply, this west London station is finding it extremely difficult to cope with the extra influx of rush-hour passengers it is currently having to deal with and, despite huge numbers of station personnel, there was a real air of chaos. I managed to catch a quick word with one of the guards and asked him which was the quickest way to get to Paddington: catching a tube or the double-decker shuttle service laid on outside.

"The bus is direct," he told me and suggested that would therefore be my best bet.

Somehow we managed to fight our way up the stairs to the station exit as literally hundreds of passengers tried to make their way down. It was no place for the claustrophobic.

It came as no surprise as we clambered our way through, to see other guards desperately trying to stop more people walking into the station, explaining that it simply could not cope. The tube would have been overcrowded and we almost certainly wouldn't have got on the first available service, anyway. But at least it doesn't travel on London's ridiculously traffic-choked roads.

The bus left Ealing Broadway at 8.23 and never once shook itself free of traffic jams.

It was almost too much for one couple, who work in the same west London office 15 minutes' walk from Paddington station. "We should have caught the tube instead," the young woman told her partner, pointing at the huge queue of cars lined up ahead of us.

"It wasn't my fault. You told me you didn't want to end up crammed into a packed carriage," the boyfriend said.

It was getting fraught but I'm glad to say they were laughing again by the end of the journey.

It was exactly 9.12 when we stepped inside Paddington Station but it just didn't seem right to be too upset about being late.

Story date: Tuesday 12 October

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.