Unexpected Brain Malfunction

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I collected my daughter from school and we walked to the train station, like we do every Thursday. I bought tickets for our journey and a train pulled into the station. It was about 5 minutes before our train was due and this one looked different to the one we usually get, so I assumed it was an earlier train, going to another place (there are 3 routes on this line). So, my daughter and I walked around for a few minutes and then went back into the building, as it was windy. The guy behind the counter shouted, ‘Didn’t you buy a ticket for that train? It’s leaving shortly’. We ran to the train and got on with a few seconds to spare. It never even occurred to me that it might actually be ours, even though our train's departure time had approached and the service is reliable and punctual. It always sits for a few minutes before departure too. What happened there? I wasn’t even stressed out. The guy’s there every Thursday. He‘s going to wonder about me now.

I was just wondering - is this sort of thing typical?

Simple answer: Yes
Everyone makes mistakes like this and fairly often.

However I do relate to a certain aspect of this. Was it that the train looked different that made you think it was not the same one?
For me I tend to see things visually and in patterns and tend to notice this above other things ( that the train was for the right time etc.)
The example I can think of although not exactly the same, was when I was in high school. My physics teacher wrote math problems visually in a different way than my math teacher. For the longest time, I couldn't understand the problems at all, no one else seemed to have a problem with it. I couldn't explain why I didn't understand the problems, something just didn't compute. When I finally figured out that the problems were actually the same as my math teacher was doing, and I had no problem with those, I kept thinking " What is wrong with me?". Why could I not figure that out?
I really struggled with that physics class, because for the first half of the year, I couldn't figure out how to do simple calculations. I just looked at them and they made no sense.

After I was dxed I looked back on things like this and thought, if I just had had some way of explaining to people what was going on, why I couldn't understand things that seemed simple to everyone else. I wanted someone to realize that I was stupid or being stubborn or difficult

Yes, I make this kind of mistake a lot. When I'm travelling on public transport I literally time every transition to the minute - and a bus or train arriving more than 2 minutes early or 2 minutes late can really throw me - so much so I sometimes get confused and think it's the wrong one. Near my house the bus leaves every 10 minutes, but very very occasionally one of them doesn't come (so you wait 20 minutes) and every time this happens I get way more upset and angry/agitated than I should considering it's never happened before when I've been on a deadline.