My first experience of a “rail replacement bus” happened after that painfully familiar red word appeared on the departure board: “Cancelled”. Underneath it, a cheerful man doing sign language smiled from the screen, which made the whole situation feel strangely ironic—the message was bad, but the interface looked very friendly. We were herded onto a coach with warm, sleepy lighting; everyone was half-tired, half-annoyed, bags stuffed under the seats, phone batteries and patience draining in sync. Every now and then I looked out of the window and saw the sky slowly turning orange behind a row of completely unremarkable buildings—the kind of view that, framed by the bus window, suddenly looked like a cinematic establishing shot, even though we were literally on a backup solution for a failed journey. Near the door I noticed the metal tracks and harnesses for securing wheelchairs and luggage, brutally functional but oddly reassuring, as if this vehicle’s whole identity was to exist “for when things go wrong”. What I found interesting is that transport infrastructure has its own Plan B aesthetic: fonts, colours, announcements, coach seats and seatbelts are usually just background, but the moment a train is cancelled they jump into the foreground and carry the whole emergency narrative. As a design student, this detour made me notice that a system’s real character often shows not when everything runs smoothly, but in those slightly chaotic moments when it has to improvise, patch itself together and still pretend everything is under control.