Would that be Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, regarding the illogical development of Waterloo and subsequent platform numbers
Yes, indeed -- Waterloo terminus was notoriously confusing and hard-to-navigate for the passenger, until radical rebuilding in the 1920s; but Jerome kind-of goes berserk with this, in the interests of comedy: with his Three Men wanting to travel from Waterloo to Kingston-on-Thames to join their boat, he describes a scene of utter incompetence and cluelessness at Waterloo -- with nobody, not even the train crews, having the faintest idea what train was going where, from which platform. In his narration, they end up bribing a loco crew to have their train be the eleven-whatever to Kingston: and he concludes, "This is how we got to Kingston by the London & South Western Railway". This strikes me as over-the-top exaggeration, starting from a basically rather tame "mess situation": I've never heard elsewhere, that the LSWR was anything other than fairly good at doing its job !
Your turn to grotesquely and inaccurately take the mickey out of your target of choice...