A newspaper probably saved his life

JAMES ALLPORT missed his usual train to King’s Cross yesterday because he stopped to buy a newspaper to read about the successful bid to bring the Olympics to London.

That simple change in his daily travel routine probably saved his life.

“Had I not let the train go because I wanted to read about the Olympics, things might have been different,” he said yesterday.

James, 29, whose mother is from Ranelagh in Dublin, works in marketing for the VSO, an international development agency.

Every day he travels by both overground and underground train from Hertfordshire to the VSO’s south London office in Putney.

Normally, he gets his first train at eight o’clock every weekday morning and gets into King’s Cross an hour later.

His train arrived as usual but there were so many commuters cramming onto it he decided to let it go and bought a newspaper to read while he waited.

“When I arrived in King’s Cross they were closing all the gates and pushing everybody out. They were saying it was a power cut but everybody realised there was something serious going on once they got out,” he said.

James had no trouble accepting that there was a power cut and it was only when he phoned his office to say he would be late that he learned that there had been a series of underground explosions.

As he carried on trying to make his way into work news of what had happened started to pass by word of mouth rather than anything else. There were no announcements.

James also found that a friend of his, Katie Edwards, was also late for her train at Edgware Road, a simple twist of fate that probably saved her life also.