Oddly enough, the exact same thing has happened to me two out of the last three days now:
It’s been rather cold (below -20°C in the mornings), so I decided to take the train instead of walking. After getting to the platform and buying my ticket, an announcement that there would be a delay due to a breakdown came on. So I waited. And waited. And waited…
And then even after the trains started arriving, they were so filled up with the backlog of people that I couldn’t even get on them. Not wanting to be That Rude Guy shoving his way on ahead of everyone else, I had to let three trains go by before one with enough room arrived. In the end I wound up waiting over 40 minutes on Monday and 30 minutes today, for a train that normally runs every 5 minutes.
It only takes me 20 minutes to *walk* to work, but the problem is that you’re trapped. Even after you’ve already spent 15-20 minutes waiting and are tempted to start walking, a train could arrive any moment now and then you’d feel really stupid for walking and stumbling through snowdrifts and facing the freezing wind over the river when you could have waited just a little longer…
Update: And apparently there was another problem today, as there was a train waiting at the station the entire time I walked past, with a ton of people still on the platform. The train’s reliability lately has taken a serious nosedive. Fortunately it’s a lot warmer today, so I was walking anyways.