Platform Four
british train travel
Scarborough to Hull
Carpe diem; as an Oscar-chasing Robin Williams might whisper over your shoulder. Life is short. I’m fast approaching thirty and have thus far achieved none of the life goals I’d set out to hit by that age; my job remains unfulfilling, Natalie Imbruglia remains un-wifed, and I’m yet to go swimming with Dolph Lundgren. Continue reading
Retford to York
Retford station is where dreams go to die. To wait there is to step into the Narnia of the rail network, you will wait hours, maybe days for a connecting train, yet when it arrives it transpires that you have stood there waiting for only ten or fifteen minutes. You can’t kill time at Retford station; you can only prolong its suffering. Reading this you will more than likely be wondering ‘where is Retford?’ and that’s the thing about the place; everyone has heard of Retford, yet no-one can quite place it, it is the nation’s Ilium bone, the ‘wasn’t he once in The Bill?’ of the railways. Continue reading
Stansted Airport to Peterborough
In a coffee shop, by the Arrivals gate at Stansted Airport, I sit and watch as a succession of holiday-makers stumble back into the real world. They emerge from the windowless exit with uncertainty and confusion, unsure whether to turn left or right, bliking like freed hostages pushed from the side door of a transit, the hood only just pulled from over their head. Each arrival is less prepared for an English autumn than the previous; tanned Essex boys back from the Med in shorts, espadrilles and ubiquitous boyband haircuts, girls in summer dresses and sunglasses with lenses the size of LPs, gap year travellers with battered rucksacks and hair braided in a Budapest hostel. Continue reading
Doncaster to York
It’s raining. Again. It has been raining constantly for the best part of a fortnight, so long that I have long begun to suspect I am inadvertently starring in a 1950s detective novel. So heavy and so hard is the rain that it would render Peter Kay too sodden to come up with a reasonable anecdote about its density. Continue reading
Birmingham New Street to Worcester Foregate Street
It probably won’t come as a huge surprise to learn that I, the twenty-something writer of a barely-read blog about domestic train travel, am single. No, really I am. There’s no accounting for taste, but apparently some women don’t find whimsical tails about a bearded guard on the 11:17 to Dorridge sexy. I’m OK with this though… no, seriously I am. I’m OK… No, no I’m not crying, it’s just… No, nothing. I’m fine. I’m OK, I swear. Look, I’m fine. Continue reading
