Surprising starts to some of Britain's most beautiful train journeys
The Man Who Pays His Way: your local station may take you somewhere special
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Your support makes all the difference.How to enrich an everyday rail journey? Scan the station departure screens for a glimpse of a faraway place, and plan for the day you will forsake your usual train and make your escape.
Laced within the most humdrum rail schedules are some exotic anomalies – even from an inner-city station or a windswept halt in rural Norfolk. You just need to know where to start. To help with that task, I enlisted three leading railway experts, and conducted some research of my own starting at Elephant & Castle in south London.
This forlorn station with a fabulous name is just three minutes south of London Blackfriars. In 180 seconds you go from a brilliantly conceived new station straddling the Thames (awarded “Major Station of the Year” in 2017) to one deserving of the title “Closest Approximation To East Berlin Before The Wall Came Down”.
For most of the day, the departure screens are short on joyful travel inspiration: “Sevenoaks via Catford”, “Sutton via Wimbledon” and “Luton” is the usual chorus. Yet each weekday evening at 7.30pm, a train draws in to platform 4 of Elephant & Castle destined for the far east. Of Kent, at least.
South London’s very own Orient Express speeds to Bromley, crosses the Medway to Rochester and shadows Watling Street to Canterbury. You could hop off in the cathedral city in time for a late dinner. Or stay on board to Dover Priory. Take a ferry next morning to Calais, and carry on by train to Constantinople – better known these days as Istanbul.
Rail guru Mark Smith will guide you to the Bosphorus and beyond, but as “The Man in Seat Sixty-One”, he can also recommend exotic journeys within Britain: “How about the Holyhead-Cardiff ‘Welsh parliament’ train with its excellent cooked breakfasts?”
This heavily subsidised service leaves the Anglesey port at 5.33am. It is designed to get travellers from North Wales to the Welsh capital by 10am. Passengers in business class, as well as normal folk in standard who pay upwards of £10 to upgrade, can enjoy a fry-up as they meander through parts of Wales and a fair bit of England: Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford are among the calls of the Y Gerallt Gymro service, which translates as “Gerald of Wales”.
Cardiff is also the final destination of the exotic journey recommended by Nicky Gardner, co-editor of Europe by Rail: the 5.20pm from Crewe.
“What better way to spend a midsummer evening than on the six-hour-plus meandering route through a fine medley of mid-Wales landscapes, eventually reaching the Bristol Channel at Llanelli and then running east via Swansea to Cardiff?”
I commend Crewe as the departure point, just before midnight, of another cross-border journey. During the day the only Scottish destinations are Edinburgh and Glasgow. But the 11.54pm northbound departure from a near-deserted Crewe station will take you to those cities and pretty much anywhere you want to go in Scotland, including Dundee, Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William.
The multi-purpose train is the Caledonian Sleeper, which also performs the commendable act of enlivening the destination boards at Watford Junction: Bridge of Orchy and Carnoustie have more allure than Balham and Clapham Junction.
Chris Woodcock, editor of the European Rail Timetable, suggests a starting point in East Anglia: “The rural Norfolk station of Eccles Road”. Greater Anglia warns prospective users of this tiny halt between Norwich and Thetford: “This station is served by a very sparse train service”.
What it lacks in frequency, Eccles Road makes up for in ambition. The 4.10pm runs direct to Nottingham and Sheffield, whereupon it races across the Pennines to Manchester and onwards to Liverpool.
“The return journey is rather more tricky,” Mr Woodcock warns. No through train runs in the opposite direction, and one of the alternatives offered includes an eight-hour overnight stay in Ely.
More appealing than Elephant & Castle, at least.
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