I’ve done quite a few railway adventures in my time – I have an entire category for them – but this is one I was deeply dubious about. I was going to Scarborough for the weekend. From Southampton.
That’s pretty much the entire length of the country, from the south coast to the north-east, just 140 miles south of the Scottish border (ok, fine, nowhere near as close to the very north of England as I thought). That’s a lot of potential for our great British rail network to mess up. In fact, this is how little faith I had in the system: I took to saying “I’m hopefully going to Scarborough this weekend” with some well-deserved doubt as to whether I’d make it.
Yes, I looked into the possibility of flying. But the nearest airports were either Newcastle or Leeds-Doncaster, which meant a decent-length train journey afterwards and didn’t work out either any faster or any cheaper. The plane to Paris is easy – it’s a quarter of the price of the Eurostar before you even take into account the cost of getting the train to London in the first place and of course it’s quicker. But Scarborough is a different matter. Speaking of price, I know you want to know how much it cost me to take a train the length of the country and back: it was £163.49 return, which is more than it cost to fly to Malaga last month, although I at least I had the option to take as much luggage as I could carry (I opted to take the same Ryanair-friendly backpack – no point in tempting myself to haul a literal ton of unnecessary stuff across the country and back).
Friday morning: an alarm at 6am, an hour’s drive to Southampton Airport Parkway, which is the nearest convenient station for catching a CrossCountry train. Both Bournemouth and Southampton Central are closer but by the time you’ve navigated busy streets and found somewhere to park, it’s so much more convenient to just go to the station. Really, it was the CrossCountry legs that concerned me. I appreciate that this country has this long-distance service that can take me directly from the south coast to Birmingham or Manchester or Newcastle without having to hub-and-spoke to London but it does have a reputation for being badly overcrowded. The trains don’t have enough carriages, as if the over-popularity of the same route over and over again is a surprise to the bigwigs every single time. When I came home from Birmingham before Christmas, we had to leave half the passengers on the platform because that many people didn’t physically fit into the train.
The Newcastle train I boarded started at Southampton Central and it was still a bit busier than I might have expected by the time it reached its second stop at Southampton Airport Parkway. I had a reserved seat and it was vacant – an aisle seat but the window seat was vacant until Reading, an hour later. I sat in it sometimes and sometimes I felt vaguely guilty, like I should shuffle over into my own assigned seat. By Reading, people were sitting wherever and two ladies – who I was to run into throughout the day – negotiated with the people sitting in their seats to just take two empty seats. They were due to be taken at Leamington Spa but either the occupants didn’t turn up or they didn’t even bother trying to find their reserved seats. Meanwhile, I had a neighbour from Reading – not the person who was supposed to be there until Sheffield, and then had the double seat to myself.
I couldn’t quite help comparing it to the Czech trains I was on only a couple of months ago, with those great big armchair-like soft padded seats and the massive tables and the overhead displays telling us what station was coming next and at what time and how to make the connections there. CrossCountry trains pack you into smaller seats, presumably to absolutely maximise capacity – and still don’t succeed.
Another thing that I notice is that CrossCountry trains are stinky diesels. My local line, the South West Main Line – that’s the Weymouth to Waterloo – has been electrified for as long as I can remember. In fact, it’s been electrified as far as Bournemouth since the 60s, according to Wikipedia, and all the way to Weymouth by the late 80s, so it astounds me that pretty much the entire rest of the country is still running on trains that chug and rattle and send out clouds of black smoke.
We were pretty much on time into York. We were pretty much on time the entire way. A lot of people emptied out at Derby for Download Festival and it wasn’t really until Sheffield that we had more than a handful of people standing up and even then, they didn’t fill the aisles right up to the middle of the coaches like they had on the way home from Birmingham.
At York I had 50 minutes to grab something to eat and find my connecting train. It sort of feels like it’s slowing down the journey – just a complete stop for nearly an hour – but I’d have been very twitchy if it had been much less, anticipating the lateness of the Southampton train. York is a pretty station, proper old-fashioned wrought-iron decorative Victorian and with some bonkers platform decisions – such as that 5a and 4 are the same platform, except that 4 is only the very furthest end of it. 5a and 5b would make so much more sense but 5b appears to be opposite.
Anyway, it was a small train that pulled in to platform 4 bound for Scarborough, which seemed to have come from Manchester. There were, I admit, probably more people on it than there would normally be. I’ll talk more about this next time but I was going to Scarborough for the Trefoil Guild Annual Meeting and making a weekend of it, since it’s a bit of a trek, and plenty of people had had the same idea. I swear, every third person at York was clearly Trefoil and at least three-quarters of the passengers on the Scarborough train. Already being half-full with passengers from across the north, it was packed by the time we all got on board, not helped by the myriad of reserved cards sticking out of the seat. We all instinctively pulled away from those seats, only to realise there just wasn’t room for everyone to pack in by the doors. Closer examination of the cards revealed that mostly they were things like “reserved from Manchester to Leeds” and that by York, they were available again. Even so, I ended up sitting on the floor by the front door. Well, there was room to sit rather than stand shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers and if you knew the age demographics of the Trefoil Guild, you’ll understand why I was the one who got to sit on the floor.
My “boutique B&B” host had texted me in the morning to ask what time I expected to arrive and I’d explained that I was coming from Southampton and it depended on what the trains felt like doing to me, but that I was due into Scarborough at 2pm and I’d be arriving at her house between 2.15 and 2.30. It therefore blew my little mind to pull in Scarborough station on the dot of 2pm. Three minutes off six hours to get from one end of the country to the other. Of course, the gap at York covered a lot of sins but there was definitely potential for me to miss the Scarborough potential. But if I arrived within that 50 minute window and made the connection, which didn’t actually seem impossible, that only really left the Scarborough train to cause my arrival at the Cordelia to be delayed. And so I arrived precisely on time, and slightly discombobulated.
The journey back was more mixed. Because I bought my tickets through The Train Line and because they’re weird, my return ticket was just an off-peak return valid on any valid route and actually, I headed back two hours early. Scarborough to York was fine – no hoardes of Trefoil! – and I had a seat and was able to enjoy the views of green and pleasant England for the best part of an hour. Then I had time at York to get some more bread and cheese and sit and eat it at platform 10 while staring at the out of service CrossCountry train that we all knew was going to become the Plymouth train about ten minutes before it was due to depart. It should have started from Glasgow so we had to play the “this seat is reserved but this person has had to find another route” game with the seats. I got one by the window but right opposite someone who “can’t go backwards” and spent Doncaster to Sheffield ostentatiously fanning herself. Emetophobia can’t deal with that so I grabbed one of the window seats further back when everyone got off – Not only am I very able to go backwards, I prefer it. But then at Derby, half the word got on. Coming back from Download already?
Now, this is exactly the situation we had at Birmingham before Christmas. Far too many people for the train and people having to stand in the aisle for the entire length of the train just to get everyone on. When I was in that position, I accepted that my reserved seat wasn’t get-at-able and I was going to have to stand. Oh, people weren’t having that! Oh, they shoved their way down this human chaos, right down the carriage and routed out the people who’d grabbed a vacant seat. Fortunately, the person who was meant to be in my seat had had their train cancelled and no one shoved me out. We came a different route from the route on the timetable, skipping Leeds and Wakefield but stopping at Doncaster, stopping at Burton-on-Trent but skipping Tamworth and getting into Birmingham 15 minutes early, which meant I had just enough time to move purposefully but without panicked rushing to platform 1 for the 17:03 to Bournemouth.
Now, the York train had been five carriages, all the way down to Plymouth because, as I said, CrossCountry just aren’t listening when people point out that the trains aren’t big enough every single time it runs this route. But the train to Bournemouth was nine carriages (a five-car attached to a four-car, which seems weird – normally they match!) and I jumped into the penultimate one, which looked like it had some space and had the word “Available” over every seat. The result was that I got a window seat all to myself and no worry about anyone turfing me out!
Again, a weird weekend route – we missed Birmingham International and Coventry and went straight through to Leamington Spa where we had to wait for ten minutes to catch up with the timetable. After that, we were back on timetable and at every stop, the train emptied out just a little more and I became a little less worried about sharing my seat with a stranger Someone on the opposite side and two rows forward had the same backpack – every time I spied it up in the rack I had a moment of panic before my eyes slid down to my own identical bag on the floor by my feet.
I’m finally getting used to the fact that the train drives into Reading and then reverses out – I was going forwards into Reading which meant I was facing backwards when we set off again after our eight-minute pause, which suits me just fine. As I said, I prefer to go backwards. I started doing it because if you sit in a seat without a table facing backwards, that’s the least desirable seat on a train and so you’re left to yourself for the longest but I’ve been sitting like that for so long that it kind of feels weird to travel facing forwards now. “The stars are going the wrong way”, as Hoshi Sato said in the first episode of Enterprise, only it’s fields rather than vistas of outer space.
Then suddenly we were at Winchester, which is just ten or so minutes from Southampton Airport and I suddenly realised that two and a half hours had just flown by. It felt like barely half an hour since we left Birmingham. Oh, the difference between an overcrowded train and one where you get the seat to yourself with no one standing over you!
And so it all went reasonably well. I got to Scarborough on time and more smoothly than I ever imagined and I got back two hours earlier than planned with only an hour of awkwardness before Birmingham and all trains running on time, if a time that wasn’t the one on the timetable. Yeah, expectations were on the floor but none the less, they were exceeded. I got to Scarborough, I got back and nothing untoward happened on the way.
I Am A Polar Bear 