Posts about travelling by train in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland in the UK, and indeed Ireland itself
Ever visited anywhere faintly morbid? A cemetery, a site where genocide has taken place, a battlefield? If so, you might be considered a Dark Tourist by the iDTR, a research project on Dark Tourism that now offers an MA in the subject. I went to interview Professor Richard Sharpley.
On this trip to Brighton I stood by the Volks Electric Railway, an actual train, and walked in the Pride procession. You could call the Pride procession the Pride Train. You know, if you wanted to. In the spirit of Pride I wore pink and had fun.
Virgin Trains ran the East Coast Mainline for a decade. Then suddenly FirstGroup won a bid at great expense to take over from Virgin. It made absolutely no business sense. This lead me to speculate that it was all a big conspiracy lead by the Department for Transport.
A French train ticketing site called capitainetrain.com is really rather good. Have a look for yourself. It's better than some of the train ticketing sites native to the UK. I was impressed. Sign up login and go. See if you like it better than what you’ve been using.
In the summer of 2012 the Olympics came to London. I went to a talk by TFL about how to get around while the Games were on. They probably went a little overboard in the end, but the bloke from TFL was very funny.
How do you solve a problem like how to save money with Eurostar when you haven’t got all your dates confirmed? I found a solution that will buy you a week of time while you finalise all the other parts of the trip. This post tells you what I found.
One day I went on a ghost hunt with Dusk Till Dawn Events underneath Temple Meads. It was my first one and having gone purely out of interest to see the otherwise closed vaults I fear I blocked the 'ghost energy.'
Had a look behind the scenes at Blackfriars station shortly before it was completed. I got to wear a hard hat, boots and reflective clothing and that was as exciting as the visit itself.